Off-the-ball screens 101: A practice breakdown
A different way to introduce this tool to your player in a more conceptual way!
Last week I was invited by Olimpia Legnaia, a great club based in Florence, to lead a few practices with their teams, ranging from U14 to U17.
I get to have fun coaching some great kids in a reality that was incredibly professional and well-organized, a club that is really investing in the development of their young players as well as their coaches.
This is the breakdown of a practice I’ve done with the U17 team, where my primary goal was to work on their ability to use off-screens.
Specifically what we focused on throughout the practice was the idea of always being a threat 1v1 without the ball.
If you’re the one coming off the screen this means reading the defensive decision and trying to punish it, but we wanted to highlight how important it is also for the screener, who needs to remain active after the screen.
This could mean different things: giving a second passing option, but where? Slipping inside or on the perimeter? Or maybe keep screening?
Disclaimer: This was not the first time that this group has ever seen any offscreen action, this is a very well-coached group by Marco Armellini, a brilliant coach and a friend.
But this was the first time they were asked to move within the actions with almost complete freedom, and I’ll add that this is a practice plan with activities that I would do also with a group who has never seen those actions before!
Practice breakdown
1v1+passer and screen
With our warm-up we jumped right into the action: An offensive player plus his defender and a passer and a chair, the defender was able to either shoot the gap or chase over the screen.
The chairs were placed in different places in the different quadrants of the floor.
We did this to just get them more familiar with the two basic options that the defense was going to perform that day, but we didn’t mention initially a specific coverage solution to those choices.
I think this part is crucial to give the offense the time and space to explore, experiment, and get to the right decision on their own before maybe intervening as coaches trying to nudge them toward a more efficient solution if they can’t reach it on their own.
1v1+2
Offense&Defense + two players that can start spaced how you want (or they want if you want to give them more freedom)
The offense passes the ball to either one of his teammates and then plays to score using 0 dribble
The two teammates have to help him score by using screens (backscreens, flare, pin-down, what they want!)
Point system: We played with normal points for baskets (2s and 3s) + 1pt for assist and 1pt for screen-assist, to try to get an incentive to the other 2 players as well to achieve their task as better as possible.
Constraints: We were continuously changing the time allowed for every rep, we changed the spacing a few times as you can see, you can change the space, or add a secondary defender in the smile to make it tougher to finish at the rim, the variations are countless!
This is one of the SSGs that I prefer to introduce players to the use of screens, I think it’s a very fun activity where they can discover many different ideas that will be very helpful in every possible context in their career:
How to get the defender into a screen, how to set him up, when to wait to use the screen, when to fake
The idea of re-triggering, or moving on to the next action if there’s no advantage on the catch, as you see here in some clips
Look at the adjustment of the screening angle that you see by very young players, without a preconceived knowledge of what they’re doing but just as an emerging solution to achieve the task they’re performing.
What we were trying to achieve here was to make them practice the general idea of screening and how we can get advantages out of it without limiting them to a specific type of screen like a pin-down, a backscreen, or something else.
2v2+Passer
5 players in a line under the rim, the passer leads and dribbles out to one position (corners, wings, or top), and the other two players move to a single and in a double gap away from him.
This start is a very flexible one that I use for many activities from 1v1 to more complex 3v3, it creates variability and different spacing while also letting our players become familiar with concepts like Single gap, Double gap, and so on.
From there when the passer connects with his teammates and they start a screening action.
Here we asked them to make a screen away all the time from different positions, later we introduced the option of having a flare screen.
Again, to make the learning curve a little bit smoother we took one option away from the defense, who was not able to switch in this first part of the SSG.
I would say that we had two major issues:
The screener was not always getting out of his screen quickly enough, either to slip at the rim or to pop out the 3pt line to give a second passing line
Adding a second defender we lose some of the focus that we had in punishing every defensive decision, we could’ve done more tight curls, and more fade to punish when the defender shot the gap.
But aside from these, which are important to consider but I would say quite normal mistakes to make in this phase of an athlete’s development, I think you could see the idea of not stopping the ball, passing the ball back to the passer and moving into a secondary screening action.
In general, I was very happy with how this phase of the practice went!
2v2+Passer: Defense can switch
Switching is the most used coverage in this age group when the size differences often are very limited.
It is important for our players to get used to playing against it, the SSG is the same as before, we didn’t request our players to use a specific tool but our request was to try to not “accept the switch”.
This is a term that I’ve used also with my professional athletes to give them the idea of acting to punish or prevent the switch before it happens or while it’s happening, instead of letting it happens and then trying to win the static 1v1 either on the post or on the perimeter.
You see some good examples here although obviously, they weren’t perfect, but the ideas were there!
On two occasions you see the defenders miscommunicating on a switch and allowing easy opportunities, one time for a layup and one time for an open 3.
3v3 Neutral or trigger
For me, the primary decision that our players need to be able to make when they catch the ball is this: Is there already an advantage or do we need to create one?
I’ll come back to this in a future article but this for me is crucial, and from this decision, we flow into the second: If there is an advantage I need to punish the defense and drive immediately, not stopping the ball and letting them off the hook, while if I’m neutral I need to do something to create an advantage, that something can be either a static 1v1 with the ball or a trigger with a teammate.
So on the first pass here you see me behind the defender sometimes artificially generating an advantage by having him touch my hand, I want the offensive player to read that while also seeing what’s happening with their teammate.
In this SSG we asked them to use an offscreen trigger if the situation was neutral, so either a screen away or a flare, but I use situations like these very often also encouraging other triggers or leaving it completely open to them.
I want to highlight two particular clips that caught my attention
I like how the player moves after the flare and the switch here! And his teammate by flashing to the top of the key at the same time is getting ready to throw the high-low pass and clears out the help side!
Particularly love this clip because the offensive player is able to perceive that he can drive 1v1 even in a situation where the advantage is not artificially created by me but simply by a poor position by the defender that gets too close to him.
This is something that can also happen in a game when we are playing offscreen situations and we want our players to be able to act upon what they perceive instead of stopping and succumbing to the pressure just because they need to execute the play!
(In this thread by Alex you find a deeper commentary on this topic)
4v4 Neutral or advantage
The underlining theme is the same as before: we either start with a neutral situation (the coach tosses the ball) or with an advantage (the coach shows both the ball and hand and the defensive player has to touch the hand of the coach).
If we are neutral what do we want to do? We don’t want to stop the ball and play static 1v1, in this SSG we constrain our players to start the possession with an offscreen.
We emphasize this via our point system, we are doubling any point generated by an offscreen action (also not directly, like a drive&kick generated by a screen)
5v5
After this we just played some 5v5 to finish the practice, the only thing we kept from the previous game was the point system, any basket generated by an off-screen action is worth double.
I just selected three nice possession here:
A ball reversal with a weak-side screen where the defense chase and the player picked the right solution to punish that
A pass ahead and a great backdoor cut against a top lock
A good example of staying active and giving a second passing option after the screen, ending up with a basket!
Final debrief
Using only 4’ minutes of our time we did some cold-calling asking our players to recap what they have learned during the practice, their perception during the SSGs and how can they apply this during their normal games and practices.
Here you can find the complete video putting together the different activities:
Some conclusive thoughts:
When first introducing the idea of screens with your players it might be a good idea to let them experiment with some situations where they can explore how to use these solutions, like the 1v1+2 screeners that you see in the beginning.
They open their minds and understand what this is about, then from there, we can proceed to zoom in on specific actions and tools, and details.When going 2v2 or 3v3 we can constraint the defense by taking away the option to play a specific coverage, as a way to have a simplified scenario for our players
Another important step is to recognize if they need the action (neutral) or if they don’t (there’s already an advantage), you can create your own situations to recreate that scenario.
The use of the point system is a good way to keep the focus on off screens actions even when we move on to part of practices where the players also have to options to do other actions, like ball screens or DHO.
Hope you add fun, hope you can maybe steal one or two ideas and change those by adding your own personal touch to it!
As always, feel free to reach out at fr.nanni@gmail.com or on Twitter
