The Pick and Roll in Basketball

Zico Coronel tells a story on EP51 about two point guards he coached against the same coverage. One was 6'6", long, with great vision. Against a show, his most common pass was what Zico calls the maestro: the direct pass to the roller. The other was a 6'1" Japanese point guard with limited length, for whom that same direct pass was very difficult. His best answer was to move the ball around the perimeter and let a teammate make the next pass into the 4-on-3.

Same coverage, two different answers. That's the trouble with teaching the pick and roll as a list of reads. The coverage tells you what the defense is trying to take away. The affordances, the opportunities for action that are actually there, depend on the player with the ball.

The pick and roll is used at every level because it's one of the easiest ways to create an advantage. A Constraints-Led Approach to Coaching Basketball lists what both teams have to keep perceiving during a single possession:

• The spacing the offense is running: middle, side, empty corner, Spain.
• How close the on-ball defender is to the handler, and what they do at the moment of the screen (over or under, in a drop).
• The coverage and the offense's response. If the guard uses a hostage dribble, the drop defender has to hold position longer to guard two without letting the roller get behind.
• What the screener does: slips or holds the screen, flips the angle, re-screens or pops.
• Who they're playing against. An athletic roller is a lob threat; a slower screener who shoots well will pop more.

So we don't install the pick and roll as a sequence of reads. We put players in games where the coverage is real and let them find what's there.

A coverage solution is how the offense punishes the way the defense guards a trigger. Transcending Basketball reframes them as attractive affordances that may appear: opportunities a team has agreed to look for. None of them is a must. Against a switch, plenty of things can work.

The trouble with "if X, then Y" (if they go under, shoot; if they switch, post the mismatch) is that no coverage is ever identical. A team that switches every pick still switches differently each time, depending on how aggressive the switching defender is, who's involved, the spacing, how the roller and handler interact, the time and score, and fatigue.

Coverage solutions don't have to be the same for every player either. In Transforming Basketball, Alex frames them as functional solutions that suit the skills and action capabilities of particular players, instead of asking the whole roster to run the same two or three answers. That's Zico's two point guards again.

On EP169 Alex talked about wanting everyone to know what the team does against each coverage, so nobody surprises a teammate (a phrase he credits to Zico). Coverage solutions narrow the options to a shared few without dictating which one a player must use on a given possession.

There are two ways to deal with a coverage. You can prevent it, by acting before the defense gets into it, or punish it once it's there. George Vaz's article on prevent vs punish calls a team that can't solve a coverage "prisoners of the coverage". The fix is either a better coverage solution or stopping the defense from playing it at all, for example by turning an aggressive switch into a late one.

Zico builds his whole offense on this split. Before the season he writes a two-page template with every spacing the team will play, every coverage it might see, and how it will prevent and punish each one. The template is for the staff, not the players. If time is short, he'd rather a team had one or two ways it's extremely competent at than five it isn't.

Here's the coverage-solution menu from Alex's Principles of Play presentation. Choose from it. You don't have to install every line.

Against the Switch

Switching is meant to take away the advantage and flatten the offense into a stagnant 1-on-1. George Vaz's article on punishing the switch gives four answers. The reject: if the on-ball defender jumps early to prepare for the switch, go away from the pick. The crack and slip: set a good crack angle and slip to the rim before the new defender can attach. The relay pass: if the pocket pass is gone, pass ahead (side spacing) or behind (rub spacing) to a teammate who relays it to the roller. And the boomerang: pass to a perimeter teammate and get it straight back, so the bigger defender who switched has to close out again.

All of these depend on the pick. Transcending Basketball points out that a screener who sets the pick too high rarely gets behind the defense, and against a switch the defense can then contain the action within the 2-on-2. Two outcome cues help: "screen the backpocket" of the on-ball defender, and "race to the rim" to win the short sprint behind the defense.

Against Show and Blitz

When two defenders go to the ball, someone is open. The short roll is the classic answer: the screener stops short, catches behind the two defenders and plays a 4-on-3. Transcending Basketball pairs it with the cut and slide, a principle for teams facing aggressive coverages. Here is how the book suggests a coach might explain it during practice:

Note the word possibility. If both defenders on the two side tag in, two shooters may be open instead, and the cut isn't the answer. Zico's version against a show in his shake spacing (both corners filled, a high wing, and the pick bringing the handler toward the middle) prioritizes two passes: the "messy" pass back to the high wing, which isolates the single-side tag, and the short roll. If the defense takes away one, the other tends to open.

George Vaz's article on mastering the short roll has more on timing and where the roller should catch.

Against Drop

Drop gives the handler space and protects the rim, so the menu changes: reject, crack and fast roll, hostage, snake, veer, and ghosting or popping with a teammate cutting the pop. Zico starts preseason with his own team playing show rather than drop, partly because it's easier to tone back to a conservative coverage later than to ask bigs who've dropped all season to suddenly show.

Against a drop, the fastest decision isn't always the best one. Transforming Basketball walks through a handler who hostage dribbles, sealing the trailing on-ball defender behind them. The mid-range pull-up is on offer, but the handler sees their defender recovering to contest and declines it. They keep the dribble alive and wait for something better: a lane to the rim, a pass to the roller behind the drop defender, or a kick-out if a helper over-helps or tags the roller. Quick decisions fit once the advantage exists. Creating it can take patience.

The Routledge book uses this game with youth players: the coach tells the defense which coverage to play and the offense works out how to score against it.

Against Ice

Transforming Basketball uses ice, a coverage against the side pick and roll, to separate a concept from a technique. A 2-on-2 side pick and roll against ice invites the snake dribble, but how the handler snakes is left to them, and other answers stay available, such as fighting the ice or the 3PT pull-up. A short clock pushes the handler to make the next pass quickly once they're out of the snake.

The book also shows how a coach can still teach solutions inside the CLA. Play 2-on-2 pick and roll in a constrained half court, with a six-second clock and the defense always in ice. After a few minutes, step in with an intervention based on what you saw: praise the handler who fought the ice and used the pick before the ice defender got there, then offer two more solutions to try, flipping the pick or bringing the ball down into a get. They're offered as possibilities to explore, not a pattern to repeat.

The Reject, Against Everything

The reject sits in every row of the table. Zico says it's emphasized in almost every pick and roll his teams run, with one exception: if the ball is already moving into a tactical advantage (say a wing-to-middle pick and roll where the defender has pinched down to help), stopping to set up a reject only buys the defense time to recover.

How a player rejects shouldn't be taught as a move. Transcending Basketball argues that a crossover, a between-the-legs or a behind-the-back reject emerges from the constraints at that moment: the distance of the defenders, the coverage, the spacing, the time and score. Naming every reject technique, or drilling one against a cone, leaves out the constraints that produced it.

Zico is clear about the order. "So for me, there's knowing spacings. This is very important that it comes first." Then a platform (for him, the shake pick and roll), then one aggressive or one conservative coverage, then that coverage's solutions, then the next coverage. Once players know one spacing, he finds a lot of positive transfer to the next.

Transforming names four pick-and-roll spacings: rub (a middle pick and roll with the ball going toward the single side), side (a side pick and roll with the handler going toward the two-person side), clear (a side pick and roll with the strong-side corner emptied) and angle (a side pick and roll with the handler going toward the corner, like a step-up). George Vaz's pick-and-roll spacings article has the diagrams.

Transcending Basketball suggests flipping the usual order. Instead of explaining the coverage solutions first, design small-sided games where the defense plays the coverages you expect to see early in the season, add a variable shot clock so the offense has to be decisive, and let solutions emerge. Some of those games use a guided defender, who changes their positioning or coverage from rep to rep so the offense never knows exactly what's coming. Then name the ones that work best for your players, and those become your coverage solutions.

If a player has the reject available in games but rarely takes it, Transforming Basketball suggests scripting it in short doses. The handler knows the reject is coming but has to reject a different way on each of a burst of three reps. Nobody tells them to use a behind-the-back. The defense still moves realistically and tries to steal the ball, so the offense isn't attuning to a passive defender.

The Routledge book runs a rub version against drop: an imaginary wall slightly wider than the lane lines, live only once the trigger happens, with 6 seconds to score, gold medals only, or the defense forced to go over the pick as add-ons. Players know no third defender is coming to tag the roller. Taking that information away keeps them at the right challenge point while they learn coverage solutions that start dominoes.

Fortnite is one of three games in Transcending Basketball built on video games, alongside Battleship and Hitman. Alex notes it will probably land better with a young team than a team of veterans.

Zico adds one more format: 2-on-2 pick-and-roll tournaments early in preseason, rotating every handler with every screener the team expects to use. Partners attune to each other's habits (who likes the lob, who likes a particular angle) and build shared affordances faster by playing than by being told.

Demonstrating the answer. A demonstration implies one ideal solution. If players need to see one, say clearly that it's one option and they shouldn't repeat it every time.

Coaches as defenders who can't show the coverage. At the professional level, to manage load, coaches often play defense. Zico described a very intellectual player telling his staff they were too slow to show accurate coverage, so he was playing off his imagination. A younger player on the same team started turning down openings in games that he'd learned to ignore against the coaches. If coaches defend, the guided defense has to be realistic, or players attune to pictures they'll never see in a game.

Making every player a pick-and-roll player. Zico won't give a player a primary pick and roll until they can read closeouts and make dominoes decisions, and that can take seasons.

For how the pick and roll fits into a whole offense, read our conceptual offense guide. For the decision side, see basketball decision-making.