Why Not Create Your Own Basketball Offense?

As you prepare for the season, many of you will run the same basic basketball offense system as you did this past season. Some of you will be looking to add some wrinkles and then others will be in the market for a total remake.

In the last two cases, the tendencies are to either borrow from the previous season’s high profile NCAA and/or NBA teams-or to borrow from teams that you play or are in your area. It’s pretty amusing when your scout team is running your next opponent’s basketball offense and slicing up your defense and you say to yourself or your staff, “This is really good stuff.” It’s very common for a number of teams in the same region to run the same or similar offenses.

Then there’s the truly “outside the box” solution of creating your own offense(s) from scratch. And-why not? You know your personnel better than anyone, you know the problems your opponents’ defenses create and if you create your own offense, you’ll understand it better and teach it better than any other offense you would borrow from someone else.

On a couple of occasions in the past, I tried my hand at creating a basketball offense – once with a very good team and another time with a struggling below average team. But, in both cases, I felt we had increased our ability to compete.

In the first case, the best teams we were facing at that time were forcing sideline and denying reversals very aggressively- so I spent a lot of effort to get a man open on the backside of the defense so we could reverse the ball. Once the ball was back to the top, we ran down-screens or back-screens on both sides of the offense. The more the ball was in the middle of the floor, the better.

In the second case, we were pretty much outmanned a lot but I had a great shooter with a quick release. To get the initial “thrust” into the defense that we needed, I had him on one block or another and to initiate the offense he got a double down screen on one side and a single screen on the other side. Depending on how his man played him, he would take either the double or the single and then either curl or flare. The point guard would enter to him and he was hunting a shot on that very first pass. A lot of the time he got a good look, at least as good as he was going to get later in the shot clock. If he didn’t have a shot, we still had a good chance to have an edge and we would keep the ball moving in a motion scheme.

The important point here is not what WE did but rather that we started with a PREMISE and devised action to adhere to the premise. In the first case, it was simply, “we have to get the ball back to middle every time.” In the second case it was, “we have to utilize our shooter’s ability to get our best possible thrust to start our offense.”

Your premise could be anyone of a myriad of possibilities and if you utilize your personnel, space the floor, teach your action, have floor balance for defensive transition, crash the offensive boards to some degree and then above all-attack, you’ll likely have success (and a lot of enjoyment) running your stuff.

The key is in the very first step – BE BOLD with your basketball offense. If you need some inspiration checkout our free animated basketball plays library here.

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