ScoutRoomIn 2025 the Netherlands won the 3x3 World Cup and the Europe Cup. They did it with the two top-ranked players in the women's game, Noortje Driessen at number one and Janis Boonstra at number two. The easy story is two great players. The more useful story for a coach is what those two players agreed to do at the defensive end, and why it is harder to copy than any offensive set they run.
A standard, not a scheme
Most teams talk about defence as a system: switch here, ICE there, send the ball this way. The Netherlands' edge is closer to a standard than a scheme. Two long, mobile players who can both handle, both score and both guard the ball at an elite level do not need a complicated plan. They need spacing on offence and a shared refusal to give up a clean look on defence. When your two best players are mirror images of each other and both defend, the scheme almost disappears. The standard is the scheme.
That is the part that does not transfer by writing it on a whiteboard. You cannot install "be the number one and number two players in the world." What you can install is the principle underneath it: in 3x3, with no help worth the name, your defence is only as good as your weakest individual defender, because the offence will find that player every possession. The Netherlands have no weak link to hunt. Most teams do, and they get hunted.
Why no help means no hiding
Three defenders, one basket, no real weak side to dig from. In 5v5 you can hide a poor defender by scheming help around them. In 3x3 there is nowhere to put them. Switch a screen and whoever ends up on the ball has to win that matchup alone. Driessen and Boonstra make switching a free action, because it does not matter who the screen leaves them guarding. Either of them can hold either assignment.
For your programme this reframes how you spend practice time. The instinct from 5v5 is to drill team help and rotations. In 3x3 the higher-leverage work is individual: can each of your players guard the ball one-on-one inside a 12-second clock without fouling. The Netherlands win that way. The teams chasing them lose because one of their three cannot, and the best offences in the world find that one every time.
Communication you cannot see on the stream
Watch the Netherlands on a broadcast and you will undercount what their defence actually is, because the camera follows the ball and the defensive talk is silent on video. Switch calls, early warnings on screens, who has the ball next: that constant communication is the connective tissue, and it is invisible unless you are in the building or running a film session that specifically tracks it. This is one reason the Netherlands' defence looks simpler on a highlight than it is in practice. The hard part is the talk, and the talk does not film.
The coaching takeaway is to train the talk as a skill, not a hope. Make defensive communication a scored part of your drills. A switch that happens silently is half a switch, because the next read is already late.
What this standard costs to build
There is no shortcut to two top-three players in the world. But the parts of the Netherlands' defence that are coachable are coachable everywhere: every player guards the ball, every player communicates every possession, and the team accepts that switching only works if there is no matchup the offence wants to attack. Build toward no weak link rather than toward a clever rotation. That is the standard the Netherlands set in 2025, and it is the bar the rest of the women's game is now chasing.
The question Bangkok asks next
The open question heading into the next cycle is whether anyone has found a consistent answer. Through 2025 nobody had. If a team does crack it, the crack will not be a new offensive set. It will be a team that can match the Netherlands' individual defensive standard across all three players on the floor, and then make them defend the same way back. That is the level the women's game is being pulled up to, and it started with a defence built as a standard rather than a scheme.