The Art of Off-Ball Screening

This blog provides an introduction into using off-ball screening actions. The idea is NOT to copy paste these ideas immediately into your offense, but provide a perspective of interesting off-ball screening concepts that could influence your half-court offense, dead ball sets, ATO design and more.

Within the blog, we explore the key details of creating advantages within off-ball screens, using NBA to highlight coverage solutions within each screening action.

How is the screen used?

A coverage solution is how the offense reads the defense and creates an advantage. In off-ball screening, this is related to the screener and receiver. It is worth noting that many of the off-ball screening actions shown below pair effectively with the use of the reject for the handler. This is a universal coverage solution that a handler should look to explore in virtually every scenario, out of every trigger. In the NBA, this is typically known as a “sneak drive”, when a handler rejects out of a screen-away or stagger scenario. 

Below you will see three different screen-aways and three different coverages. 

Fiebich is able to curl and attack the basket as Willams goes OVER the screen and the coverage is “stay with your own.”

Queta sets the away screen and Anderson point switches. Queta recognizes the affordance and slips the screen.

Hield does a great job of setting Pritchard up for a screen from the one of the best screen setters, Looney. Pritchard rides Hield until he decides at the last second to go under. Hield stops short for the 3PT shot. 

There is never just one solution to the problem, which is part of what makes basketball such a dynamic sport. Here, for example, Hardy goes over to take away the 3PT shot, but Hield still finds an open shot as Looney makes enough contact on the screen to free him up. 

Using Screens as a Teaching Tool

While knowing the names and types of off-ball screening actions can be useful, we believe youth coaches should simply focus on the most frequent screening actions: a wide (single screen-away), flare and stagger. This is all youth players need to know in order to play at a higher level.

Coaches should focus on how to teach players to read the defense in real-time and make decisions based on the affordances that appear.

One effective way to do this is through small-sided games (SSGs) that focus on a particular type of screen (e.g., flare or wide) and provide repetition without repetition in a live, variable context. This not only improves the players’ timing and communication but also sharpens their decision-making in dynamic situations.

Teaching Tips for Reading Coverage:

• Ask, don’t always tell: Ask players, “What did you see?” after each possession involving a screen. Asking questions BEFORE direct instruction is a powerful tool. Reminder – it’s perfectly OK to instruct using principles of play. For example, “they switched the screen, you should have looked to slip or screen your own.”

• Film breakdown: Show examples (like the clips above) where the same screen leads to different outcomes based on the defense’s actions.

• Mix coverages in activities: Mix up the defensive coverage (switch, chase over, top lock, etc) so players are forced to focus on how the defense is guarding them.