Introducing a Conceptual Offense Part 2: XsOs and generic rules

A case study and some general ideas

INTRODUCTION

Here you can find the first part of this brief introduction to conceptual offense, focused primarily on general ideas of playing, neutral vs advantage, and how to practice it.

Today I’ll share the specific rules and boundaries that we introduced in OUR conceptual Offense two years ago.
These rules are obviously depending on the context and the personnel available, the goals that you have for your time, the time available to implement such rules, and so on.

I’ll start off with some general considerations that everybody should have when introducing any sort of offense, conceptual or not, to his team:

Positions(less)

The first question that we have to ask ourselves is: Are we going to have specific roles for players? If so, which? How many?
The answer for my team was that we were going to have only 1 clear “role”, the 5.
Players 1 through 4 were interchangeable in their positions on the floor at all times, although as we said last time we really stressed the idea of knowing who you are and which solutions are more appropriate for you to use when playing triggers with your teammates.
It’s absolutely possible to play versions of conceptual offense with two bigs on the floor, it’s possible to have only two/three players identified as “primary ball handlers”, the number of possibilities is infinite.

Alignment

There are multiple options to pick from, a lot of the conceptual offense that we see from NBA teams is usually starting out of a 5-out alignment, with some 4-Out-1-In examples. But with your team you can generate something starting out of a double high alignment (as you see here), or any other possibility you want.

We decided to have a 5-out alignment, and as we mentioned before our number 5 was the only player that we wanted in a specific position, 1-2-3-4 are interchangeable, and that will be true for all the other diagrams that you will see in this post.
Altough obviously every one of them can have different skills and they were primed to act accordingly.

Starting alignment

We will see later what we wanted to do when 5 was running in transition not in that middle lane.

Possible entries

Once we’ve established our alignment we can decide which possible entries we want to use.
Entry: A specific trigger (or combination of triggers) to use when we’re Neutral arriving in transition, usually called out by the player handling the ball.

We had 3 main entry, presented here quickly, nothing new, we’ll see how we can combined this action with some freedom and the possibility to select a trigger to play.

Drag

No need to explain, ball screen in transition for the ball handler.
It’s a simple and immediate way to trigger an advantage and to make the defense declare early, showing us a coverage and putting us in the position to punish it.
We’ll see later how we the players had the freedom to twist this entry.

Away

Screen away in transition is another quick option that can provide immediate advantages, like a shoot or a dynamic 1v1, but can also be a perfect way to move on to other triggers.
I’ve spoken about this trigger here, we used it a lot last year with our Pro team as well.
From here the player who came off the offscreen had multiple options, passing to the 5 and playing a split action, playing a P&R with the 5, or a handoff with 1.

Get

Pass to 5 and immediate get action, to either attack immediately or use the rescreen vs the under.
We called this Get, because it was our terminology for the action that opens up this trigger, but from here we could either enter into a get action or playing something else, with the rules that we’ll see later.

It’s the type of spacing that in the NBA is called “Delay”, ball to 5 and players spaced out outside the 3pt line.

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Exchange on the side

This was one of our most important rules, the name is not very creative and I’m sure you can come up with better ways to phrase it, but the concept is clear:
While there’s a entry happening, Drag, Get, Away, the player on the wing can “exchange himself” with his teammate in the corner, both on the ball side (dribble handoff) and on the weak side, either with a screening action or with a cut.
Some examples to make it clear:

Example of exchange on an Away entry

On an Away entry the player receiving the screen can decide to “exchange” with his teammate, either screening him creating a stagger, or by cutting at the rim, creating the space for 2 to move up, maybe attracting the help of his defender for a moment.
Remember, the roles are interchangeable, so this can happen for many reason, maybe we have our best shooter in the corner, or maybe that time the players just wanted to be unpredictable.
As we said last week, it’s important to determine who’s in charge of this decision, in our system the player on the wing was in charge of initiating this Exchange.

Example of exchange on a Drag entry

Very simple to understand in this situation, once we’re into a Drag entry, the ball handler could sprint and accelerate toward his teammate in the corner and play a dynamic handoff to create an advantage for his teammate entering into the P&R.
This can also happen if 1 is trying to reject the screens, but once there’s no advantage on the drive he “recycles” his drive into a handoff.
It’s important to consider that the exchange here can also happen with a different action, the ball handler could pass the ball up to his teammate, set a first screen/ghost and letting him dribble into the P&R with 5.

Example of exchange on a Get entry

Get entry, here 1 instead of getting the ball back from 5 decides to set a screen for the corner, it could’ve happened also on the opposite side.
The player could read this split in many different ways, our only direction was that we want one of the two players to sprint to the ball, arriving there with separation (Always Arrive Alone) is another point of emphasis for us while teaching these actions.
With the Get we’re going to see another important principle:

“Connection = direction”

The player with the ball connects with teammates

This is a rule that we introduced after a few months, the diagram is from a Get action but this can apply in other situations as well, imagine a player that has caught the ball after an Away entry.
The idea is that the player with the ball can decide which side does he want to play on, so for example if 5 catches the ball and immediately turns his head to move the ball to the opposite side it’s a trigger for everyone to understand and react accordingly.
It requires some understanding from the player involved, for example if that pass from 1 to 5 was in a very short space and when the ball is arriving 1 is too close to 5, it could be dangerous to play on the other side, showing the back to X1 who’s in a good position to help and poke the ball.

The idea of “Connection” is very important for me and it’s something that we practiced also with younger groups, as young as U12, at those ages the connection is important to “activate” reactions like a cut & replace, a dribble at, a blast cut, and so much more.

Terminology and combining actions

After the first trigger, our entry, the principle is to keep being aggressive 1v1 with and without the ball, trying to punish whatever coverage the defense show us.
Part of building up this system was constructing SSGs were the offense only had the first trigger available to generate an advantage and 8” to score off it.
What happened when after the first trigger we were in a Neutral situation?
Most of the time we continued moving free playing through triggers picked by the players reading the situation as we’ve seen last week, but we also had the possibility of combining actions.
This can be something important especially playing with Pro players.

This is one of the reason why it’s important to have a clear terminology within your team, for example as you see in the diagrams below, for us we used the abbreviation “pin” for every vertical pin down for the corner, and we could call it (both from the bench and the players themselves) combined with the primary entry.

Combining actions through simple terms that are clear for all the players

It’s important to notice that in this can the pin down was something that COULD be an option if we simply called “Get”, it was not out of the realm of possibilities, we’re now simply calling for that specific options.
Having a clear terminology of actions and combinations of actions is also a great way to reduce the time that we used explaining and correcting during practices.

As we said earlier the principle was always to stay aggressive 1v1, if there’s an opportunity to break down the defense by going 1v1 we always primed our players to act on that, not getting limited by the option that we picked before.

Flip: Another possible term we had

Just another diagram to show you another term that we used, we could speak with our players of Away/Get/Drag Flip and they would understand what it was, this is just an example for you to create and combine actions as you’d like.
Having different possible options not only give the coach the option to exert some control in specific moments if that’s what he needs, but can also be a tool show our players new options and triggers that they can pick up and implement in unpredictable moments throughout the game.

Transition: Few & Simple ideas

In transition we had very few principles, but we tried to insist on those very much, starting from the assumption that the most important part for what we wanted to build was having a quick reaction time from defense to offense and getting immediately into the “Offense” mindset, this was practiced constantly throughout our small sided games, from 1v1 all the way up to 5v5.

• Find the closest sideline: As soon as our team get control of the ball a player should sprint in offense finding the closest sideline, leaving the middle of the floor open for the ball handler.
  Sprinting to the corner if it’s empty, stopping at the wing if there’s already a teammate in the corner.
  The role doesn’t matter, we will see what we wanted to do when 5 was not in the middle of the floor behind the ball.

• Rules to rim-run: Which are the situations where a player can run at the rim or in the smile instead of close to the sideline?
  1 - If a player is in front of his defender, either to receive a long pass or to put pressure on a second defender to guard him opening up a teammate.
  2 - If a player has a size mismatch, he should sprint straight to the smile (NOT THE LOW POST) and be a threat for a pass. Once again, we stressed how important it was not only to be a target for the pass but to attract 2 defenders to you early in the possession and get the defense scrambling.

Half-Court offense: 5 is in a different spot

Last part of this article, what we wanted to do when running up the floor we find ourselves with our 5 not in the middle of the floor.

• Screen your way up: This was our primary rule for 5 whenever he was in a different position after our transition.
  Two things important to notice, he was supposed to screen his way up ONLY if we were in a neutral situation, if there was already an advantage, a scrambling defense, he could move in the space in the best way possible to maintain that advantage, cutting, pinning in, moving in the dunker spot.
  The second thing to remember is that these were the rules that I’ve set up for an U19 group, they could obviously become more complex for a pro team.
  Coming up with specific triggers to have for 5 in different positions on the floor.

General principle applied in different situations

So if the ball was on the wing and 5 in the opposite corner he could came up either with 2 screens, with a flare or backscreen to the top, he had some freedom to decide what to do within the general idea.

Another reminder that we can always exchange on the side and play an aggressive trigger between “guards” when neutral even without involving the 5, especially if the weakside is distracted by what’s happening.

Same principle applies if the ball is in the middle, obviously if 5 makes a flare screen on his way up we are absolutely free to attack that, without waiting for 5 to get to the top.

Here you can see one more time how we could mix principles together, the ball is on the wing and 5 is screening his way up, so there can be a step up drag, or a pitch ahead and get action, but at the same time 2 can exchange with 1 and create a dynamic entry with a DHO+Step up P&R.

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Conclusion

Walking through our conceptual offense I hope that you can be inspired and primed to come up with your own rules, right for your specific team with its needs and constraints, the possibilities are infinite.
Some recapping of the main point of emphasis I wanted to share:

• Decide what to do with Positions and roles with your team, be clear in sharing this information with the players.

• Pick an alignment that is going to be the starting structure of your conceptual offense, it can be anything, if you’re used to coach for many years with a specific motion (i.e. Flex) you can start with that alignment where you’re comfortable and build up options from there.

• Codify different entries that the players can select, if there’s only one entry is a set play.
  Come up with clear and simple names for them, it will be easier to combine actions later

• Define rules and situations where your players have freedom to act: Here we’ve seen the concept of “Exchange on the side” and the wide array of situations where that can be applied to, and the idea of “Connection=direction”, that is also used in all different entries.

• Share a common terminology and use it to create combined actions, we’ve shared how we could have a “pin” option in all of our entries, but it can also be something common like a Pistol action, which is a combination of a throw ahead, get and flare screen. We don’t need to have special names just for the sake of it, it’s important that our players knows what we’re saying.

• Adopt simple rules in transition that allows you to flow seamlessly into your half-court offense, you can decide how much you want to prioritize running and attacking in the first seconds, it’s up to you.

• Find a way to create possible problems for the defense just while moving into your alignment, concepts like “Screen you way up” allows you to be a threat in every phase of the offense, not to jog slowly into the alignment we want.

I hope every coach was able to get something out of this, the topic of Conceptual Offense is incredibly wide and there is still a lot to be said, I hope to come back on this in the future, for every questions and suggestions for possible topics you can mail me at fr.nanni@gmail.com

Thanks you for reading through it all, as always you can subscribe here for free, and share this with your fellow coaches if you want!