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Nonlinear pedagogy is an approach to coaching underpinned by an ecological dynamics theoretical framework. This approach is particularly relevant in a sport such as basketball,…
What I Learned in Italy about the American Youth Basketball System (guest blog written by Kareem Kalil) This blog summarizes the key differences in the…
We often get asked about our favorite books and podcasts. So we thought we would share some of them. Mark Jablonski from our Tuesday’s Share…
Teams of all levels spend many hours working on their offense, but often without having shot selection clearly defined. Defining basketball shot selection within a…
This blog was co-authored by Alex Sarama and the team at Emergence. Check out the great work our friends at Emergence are doing by clicking…
Let’s begin by defining what an offensive advantage looks like. I use the following terminology to help players at all levels from youth to pro…
The concepts of ecological dynamics are not solely confined to the practice environment, but should also shape how coaches design their offensive and defensive schemes.…
How We Currently Coach Basketball Finishing Every year, hundreds of thousands of young people are introduced to the great game of basketball. At an early…
I’ve been fortunate to travel and observe numerous academies and club structures from Mini-Basket to U20’s, particularly within Europe. Especially over the last seven years,…
In the modern game, the offense is often looking to create an advantage through the ball screen. Depending on how the defense guards the ball…
Two key considerations of ball screen offense is your spacing principles and what coverage solutions are emphasized. Generally speaking, your spacing principles are how the three players not involved in the action are reacting to the action while coverage solutions are what the two players involved in the ball screen are doing to punish the coverage.
Spacing
It is worth looking at the different ball screen spacings. When the ball screen occurs, the offense can be in any of a number of different spacings. We are going to organize into five different spacings. The coverage solution chosen by the offense will be more effective in certain spacings compared to others. Any of these spacings can be identified by the positioning of all five players on the court.
Partizan’s Spacing Concepts
In this section, we are going to focus on two spacings: Shakes and Elbow spacing. The goal of whatever your spacing concepts are is to punish the “take two” defender whenever a defender on the two side helps on the ball handler or roller by making it difficult to guard both players. We are going to look at two examples of concepts used by Željko Obradović and Partizan.
[embed]https://vimeo.com/681349231[/embed]
In this first example, the offense is playing out of Shakes spacing. The nail defender is loaded to the ball in order to discourage the ball handler getting downhill. By baseline cutting and sliding, it clears the nail and creates a double gap for the ball handler to attack. The defender cannot both help in the gap and make the long closeout. This can be a great movement to use to attack the screener’s defender if the defense is playing in drop coverage.