JONATHAN CHAIT MARCH 7, 2011
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How the pick and roll became the hot play in college basketball:
When Illinois coach Bruce Weber started his coaching career as an assistant at Western Kentucky and Purdue, hardly any college teams used the pick-and-roll as a central part of their offense.
Indiana coach Bob Knight’s motion offense and North Carolina coach Dean Smith’s fast-break offense were the standards. Screening was still used, but more in the confines of offensive movement as part of cuts.
Then Stockton found Malone and the Utah Jazz perfected the art of the two-man game. A generation of players started wanting to run the pick-and-roll. Even as the Jazz used it to reach success in the late 1980s and early 90s, the ball screen’s current incarnation didn’t evolve until the past decade. ...
“It’s tricky to defend,” Notre Dame coach Mike Brey said. “It isolates stuff, it inverts, it brings a big guy out. There has been more clinic discussions in the last three years in the off-season of topics of how to defend the ball screen.”
Few have figured out a good way to stop everything that the ball screen offers.
Jeter estimated it is almost 60 percent of the Milwaukee offense. Cluess uses it 25 percent of the time. Michigan coach John Beilein said he has used it more this year than he has at any time in his career.
Example:
8 comments
What absolute nonsense! The first thing we learned in high school basketball (circa 1963) was the pick and roll and it was the staple of our offense. I was at Indiana University when Bob Knight started his coaching career in 1972 and the pick and roll was central to what was later called his motion offense. To quote the sage Ecclesiastes, "nothing is new under the sun."
- agoldhammer@yahoo.com-old
March 7, 2011 at 5:17pm
So did the ancient Romans have the microchip, then? Absolute nonsense, indeed.
- liberalref
March 7, 2011 at 5:51pm
snd
- Nusholtz
March 7, 2011 at 6:33pm
SND seconded.
- liberalref
March 7, 2011 at 9:14pm
The pick and roll was not at all "central" to Knight's motion offense. That's about as far from the truth as you can get.
- RerunStubs
March 8, 2011 at 12:05am
To wit: "The thing that blew me away, at Indiana we never ran a play," Isiah Thomas would say. "It was read and react and you really had to think your way through the game. The first time I ran a pick-and-roll was in the NBA."
- RerunStubs
March 8, 2011 at 12:09am
That video does not provide good examples of pick and roll offense. The first play is basically a version of the princeton offense. The second and third plays are just picks to free the shooter, the screener does not roll or pop to receive a pass. The fourth play features an off-ball screen to get the shooter the ball. The fifth play shows a half effort slip screen but no action off of it since the ball handler drives separate from the screen.
- aylwards
March 8, 2011 at 9:17am
Part of the problem here is tha the article conflates the "pick and roll" with a ball screen. And as aylwards has pointed out, many of the plays in the video do not even involve ball screens.
- RerunStubs
March 8, 2011 at 9:56am