Read a possession
One sentence, six words, ten seconds of basketball, taken apart
The front page opens with a sentence somebody says in a room:
They iced the drag and the low man tagged, so 5 short-rolled and hit the weak corner.
That is about ten seconds of basketball, and it is six pieces of vocabulary, two decisions and one consequence. This page takes it apart in the order it happened. Every phrase links to its entry, which has the definition and the picture, and to the lecture that teaches it.
If you read nothing else on this site, read this page. It is the whole thing in miniature: an action, the coverage chosen to stop it, the help that coverage requires, and the shot the offense gets because that help had to come from somewhere.
“the drag”
Start with what the offense did. A drag screen is a ball screen set in transition by a trailing big, before the defense is set. It is the first action of lecture 3.2, and its whole value is timing: the screener arrives at the arc a step before his own defender does, so for one beat the two defenders in the screen have no agreed answer to it.
Nothing has gone wrong for the defense yet. A drag is a question, asked early.
“they iced”
Here is the first decision, and it belongs to two defenders. Ice is a pick-and-roll coverage: the on-ball defender jumps to the high side of the handler, between him and the screen, and forces the dribble down the sideline instead of into the middle. The big drops below the screen to meet the drive. The screen is refused rather than fought over. It is one of six coverages in lecture 4.3, and choosing it says something specific: this defense would rather give up a baseline drive than a handler coming downhill through the middle of the floor.
Against a drag, icing is also a race, because the big has to get level with the screen before it is set. That is the subject of lecture 4.2.
So far the possession is two defenders doing their jobs. The sentence has not yet said anything went wrong.
“and the low man tagged”
Now the third defender. The low man is the weak-side defender nearest the baseline, and in every coverage on this site he is the one with two jobs: guard his own man in the corner, and meet whatever comes to the rim. When the screener rolls, there is a beat when the roller is between the two defenders in the screen and neither can reach him. The tag is the low man stepping into the lane to bump the roller for that beat and then leaving again.
It is a delay, not a switch, and it is taught in lecture 4.4. It is also the moment the possession turns, because the low man cannot be in two places, and the sentence is about to say where he was not.
“so 5 short-rolled”
The offense’s answer. A short roll is the screener cutting off his roll, stopping around the free-throw line instead of running to the rim, and catching the ball there. He does it precisely because the defense committed two players to the ball and a third to tagging him: catching short puts him behind the first two and in front of the third, with the ball, facing a defense that is now three against four. That arithmetic is 4-on-3, and both are in lecture 3.3.
The word so in the sentence is doing real work. The short roll is not a separate idea from the tag; it is the counter to it.
“and hit the weak corner”
And the shot. The weak corner is the corner on the help side, and it is the shot the modern offense is built to find for one reason: it is the spot the low man had to leave in order to tag. The corner is the shortest three on the floor, taught with the rest of the floor in lecture 3.10, and the pass to it out of a short roll is the kick-out of the same lecture.
Nobody was beaten. Every defender did the job his coverage gave him. The offense took a rule the defense had agreed on in advance and made it produce an open shot, which is what a good offense does and why the defense has to choose between coverages rather than find a correct one.
What to notice, if you watch the next one live
Three things, in this order, and none of them is the ball.
Where the big goes when the screen is set. Backward is drop or ice; still at the screen is at the level; forward is a hedge or a blitz. That one step tells you the defense’s whole plan for the possession, and it happens before anybody shoots.
Which defender leaves first. Help has to come from somewhere, and the somewhere is a man. Watch who steps in, and you know which shot is about to be open, a beat before the pass.
What the offense does second. The first action rarely scores. The short roll, the kick-out and the skip pass are all second actions, and a possession is usually decided by whether the offense has one.
Where to go next
The four chapters, in the order a possession happens:
- Chapter 1, where the game came from, five eras bounded by dated rule changes.
- Chapter 2, how it is played now, measured, with every number sourced or marked as a gap.
- Chapter 3, the offense, from the break to the late clock.
- Chapter 4, the defense that answers it, in the same order.
Or start from a word you heard: the Reference lists every term A to Z, each with its definition, its picture, and the lecture that teaches it.