Simple pick-and-roll has ‘many moving parts’

Mastering most basic of plays is more complicated than it might seem to be at first

On the first day of the first practice for any basketball player at any age, the coach starts talking strategy and systems and one of the first things ever discussed is the pick-and-roll.

The ballhandler uses a teammate as a kind of a blocker, a shield, a tool to use to set offence in motion. It’s the most rudimentary of plays, one drilled from the start.

And at the highest level the game is played, they’re still teaching it and still using it and still trying to figure out all of its intricacies. It’s personnel and misdirection and geometry, the simplest of plays and the most complex.

“There’s just so many moving parts,” Toronto Raptors coach Dwane Casey says. “Just so many things you’ve got to do. It’s complicated.” Indeed. Every NBA team — heck, every basketball team in every league at every level in every country on Earth — runs some kind of pick-and-roll in its offence: guard on guard, guard on wing, wing on big, big on big. There are dozens of permutations, but at the heart it’s basic.

“You’re basically playing two-ontwo basketball, and two-on-two basketball is hard to defend,” says Raptors point guard Kyle Lowry.

It’s impossible to easily explain why it works so well at the highest level of the game when it seems such a simple play, but it does. It creates mismatches. It creates space. Coaches spend hours figuring out how best to guard it, and no one has come up with anything that works with any consistency.

“Just so many things that you’ve got to do and if you’re not in rhythm, on the same page, communicating (defences break down),” Casey said. “You have a way you want to send a certain player, so the guy setting the screen, his defender, has to call it out at the right time.

“But it all starts on the ball. The two players in the coverage on the ball dictates a lot of what happens on the end. You make a mistake early, there’s usually a mistake late at the rim.”

The best defenders and the best at using the play as an offensive weapon are almost always the smartest players on the court, able to read and react instantly.

“You have to know the game, who you’re playing with, who you’re playing against and what they’re doing,” Lowry said. “You have to adjust coverages, you have to mix it up, and that’s one way defences try to stay in front of offences.”

Longtime Raptors point guard Jose Calderon, who made his only visit of the season to the Air Canada Centre with the Los Angeles Lakers on Friday night, has carved out a 12-year NBA career largely on his ability to run a pick-and-roll like few others. He’s won Olympic medals and world championships and played in 761 NBA games running a version of the same play with any number of other guards, forwards and centres.

“(It’s) because he’s a good shooter, so you can’t go under, you have to go over (the screen on) him,” Lowry said.

“If you can shoot the ball, it changes the game a lot.” No one understands that more than the 30-year-old Raptors point guard, whose ability to go around a screen and get a shot up has enhanced his offensive game immeasurably.

“If I make shots, then you can’t go under on me,” Lowry said. “My first couple of years in the league, I was known as a driver. I still got to the basket, but it makes the game a lot easier if I can go out and make threes.

“It’s a hard skill to get, but if you can get it, to be able to shoot on the move, it’s a great skill to have.”