Coach’s Box With Coach Mattocks — Ballscreen Defense
Defending the High Ballscreen – Coach Ryan Mattocks
This is third installment in “The Coach’s Box” with Coach Ryan Mattocks. You can see the first two here. He has years of basketball coaching and scouting experience and has studied the coaching strategies of numerous coaches on all levels. He is currently looking for coaching opportunities on the college level. Contact him coachmattocks@gmail.com.
Ballscreen defense is a topic familiar to players and coaches at competitive levels everywhere. And it’s also a recurring challenge that has no clear cut solution. How different coaches defend the ballscreen depends on a number of variables: the relative athletic ability of his players on the floor, how quick the opposing teams ballhandler is, how tight that ballhandler’s handle is, the range on the screener’s jumpshot, whether the screener has good hands or not, the shooting ability/range of the ballhandler, how much help can be given off the ball…it goes on and on.
Needless to say, if defending this play was straightforward then John Stockton wouldn’t have dished out almost 16,000 assists in his career. Executed well, the PNR or any of its variations can be frighteningly effective.
For teams who pride themselves on pressuring the basketball and creating offense off their defense, like Duke, the priority when considering how to defend ballscreens is stopping the ball. Communication from the backline on a ballscreen in the middle of the floor (from the bigs) is crucial. The 4 or 5 man (whoever’s guarding the screener) must let the on-ball defender know where the screen’s coming from. In today’s clip, Mason Plumlee’s job is to make sure Q. Cook knows a ballscreen is coming to his right in order for Cook to get over top of it. Mason, I’m assuming, is tasked with corralling the ballhandler (i.e., not letting him turn the corner) and recovering to his man after Cook has regained defensive position in front of Moore.
Let’s look at the initial alignment…
Coach’s Box With Coach Mattocks — Backscreen Defense
Utilizing and Defending the Backscreen
Part Two
By: Ryan Mattocks
In our second part of the series, DukeHoopBlog will dissect NC State’s effective use of the backscreen in the halfcourt out of a 2-3 high alignment in their upset win over Duke on January 20, 2010.
“I swear I’ve seen this somewhere before.”
In basketball, coaches at the highest levels will do just about anything to gain a competitive advantage. Part of that is having no shame in “borrowing” from their colleagues’ philosophies, both past and present, when the situation calls for it. Wolfpack head man Sidney Lowe did just that last season in his team’s dismantling of the eventual National Champions by resuscitating an age-old M2M offensive series introduced over 40 years ago by arguably the greatest coach to ever don a whistle. John Wooden’s legendary “UCLA High Post Offense” proved to be an instrumental part of Coach Lowe’s gameplan. Today we’ll break down one exchange from the game in which the Wolfpack executed it beautifully and explain both why it worked and what Duke could have possibly done differently to defend against it.
Coach Lowe is not alone in his affinity for the ageless high-post attack. Bob Huggins, Jim Harrick, Mark Gottfried, Ben Braun and Rick Carlisle (NBA) are just a few contemporary names you may recognize who have also tinkered with the Wizard of Westwood’s creation in recent memory. Just as the great artists throughout history have had pupils, so have the truly innovative coaching minds in basketball.
The backscreen, the specific aspect of Wooden’s High Post Offense we’re focusing on, has proven potent in other offensive alignments over the years as well. North Carolina’s famed secondary break has effectively utilized backscreens for decades (you may recognize their “High Screen” set where the PG comes off a high ballscreen and they get a lob off screen-the-screener action), but the Heels have also done a good job, historically, of backscreening against zones (see Kevin Salvadori’s backscreen at 0:21 of this clip from the ’93-’94 season: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HeCV-WGulo). Similarly, the Princeton Offense, perfected by coaching wunderkind Pete Carrill, has actions that revolve around backscreening in the high post (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtwRI147E9c).
What does all this mean? To me, it screams, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” Just as Bill Carmody’s Northwestern teams pay homage to Pete Carrill by running the Princeton Offense with great precision and efficiency today, Wooden’s High Post Offense rears its head in different forms throughout the college basketball landscape to this day. Let’s watch it in action and see how backscreening within it can produce easy buckets.
Pause at 0:55 of the clip. Play runs from 0:55-0:59. Read more
The Coach’s Box with Coach Mattocks
We’re going to start a new weekly feature called The Coach’s Box as the season kicks off and try to bring some knowledge your way. A friend of mine, Coach Ryan Mattocks, will impart the wisdom he has learned over years of instructing and teaching basketball players in the Southeast. His first installment covers the sideline out of bounds play (SLOB) and uses an example from a 2005 game in Cameron versus St. John’s.
Utilizing and Defending the Backscreen
Part One
By: Ryan Mattocks
The backscreen (when an offensive player sets a screen with his back to the basket – freeing up a cutter going towards the basket) is an underappreciated aspect of halfcourt offensive play that accounts for many of the spectacular dunks the casual fan tends to take for granted. For this initial installment, I’ll break down two situations (one offensive, one defensive) involving backscreens and how Duke’s respective teams either executed or defended them.
Watch 0:50-1:03
“Why don’t we run that alley-oop play more often?”
