If you’ve been watching the NCAA tournament this year, you’ve been seeing a lot of something you didn’t see much of just a few years ago: the ball screen.
Explained simply, the ball screen is essentially what most basketball fans recognize as the pick-and-roll – a screen set on the guy defending the ball-handler. There are many complex wrinkles off this definition, but for our purposed we can equate the ball screen with the pick-and-roll two-man game that dominates the NBA.
Not long ago, college coaches eschewed the pick-and-roll offense, since it isolates the offensive play to a couple of players, while the rest of the team essentially stands around and watches. Bob Knight’s motion offense, which involves all five players moving and handling the ball, or Roy Williams’ fast break offense were the preferred methods of most every team on most every play.
Now, the ball screen is an integral part of every team’s offense, and there are some teams that run a ball screen pick-and-roll every possession.
Michigan coach John Beilein told the Detroit News last week that a center in today’s college basketball game is called upon to set a ball screen 300 percent more than he would have been just ten years ago, and 100 percent more often than five years ago.
“It’s incredible,” Beilein sad. “It’s changing the game.”
But why?
The simple answer is that the pick-and-roll, if executed correctly, is essentially impossible to defend. But the pick-and-roll has been around at every level of basketball for as long as the game has been played. Why the sudden explosion at the college level?
“It all basically comes down from the NBA,” Iona coach Tim Cluess told college basketball writer Mike Rothstein last year, talking about the spread of the ball screen. “What you’re going to see in college basketball usually happens in the NBA several years earlier and it come down from there.”
But this still doesn’t explain it. The pick-and-roll has been the bread-and-butter play in the NBA for a couple decades.
But as I see it, two things have changed in college basketball that have led to the overwhelming change toward the pick-and-roll.
One is that youth athletes have been pushed over the past decade to choose one sport to specialize in. In the offseason, instead of playing football or baseball or running track, basketball players are playing AAU, attending camps and spending countless hours in the gym working on their shot. To this end, college basketball players are arriving on college campuses with more refined skills than they were even a decade ago.
We are seeing big men who move their feet better than before, and who are much better jump shooters than we used to see. And when you have a big man who doesn’t just rebound and play under the basket, but can also move his feet to screen a guard, and then either roll to the basket or step out and shoot. When a big man can move, roll and shoot, that is when the ball screen becomes unstoppable, because a defense cannot defend all those options at one time.
The other reason I believe we are seeing the pick-and-roll take over the college game is because college basketball rosters turn over so much from year to year. Four and five-year players are a rarity in college basketball. Rampant turnover is prevalent not only at the major programs, where players go pro early, or transfer to find more playing time, but also at the small and mid-major level, where schools pluck players from junior colleges, and accept more transfers. This year's Cinderella darling Norfolk State, for examples, relied on contributions from six players who started their career at another school, while top seeds Michigan State and Kentucky have rosters comprised almosty entirely of players who never played a minute at the school before this season.
The pick-and-roll offense is easier and quicker to learn and to be a part of than the five-man motion offense, which benefits from greater team cohesion and players who are willing to sit on the sidelines for a year or two while they learn the offense.
Northwestern coach Bill Carmody tells a story of attending a clinic years ago put on by then-Detroit Pistons coach Chuck Daly. Over 90 minutes, Daly explained nine different ways to defend the ball screen, finally ending the session by telling the audience, “you know what? None of them work.”
And that’s a pretty good reason for college coaches to fall in love with the ball screen, too.
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Follow Bison Messink on Twitter: @BisonMessink
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