The Ball Screen Coverage Spectrum

Houston is at one end of the spectrum, the team at the other end may surprise you.

Welcome back to another edition of The Starting Five. To read last week’s version, you can click/tap here.

Out of all the schematic decisions a coach has to make for a game or season, I’d argue that the most important is how to guard the ball screen.

Modern offenses are dominated by ball screens, so — naturally — the defensive coverages used to guard those screens are crucial to success.

Of course, there’s not necessarily a right or wrong way to defend the ball screen. In recent years, defenses like Houston and Virginia have had success being aggressive against the ball screen — attacking the ball handler and getting it out of his hands. On the other hand, defenses like Creighton and Alabama have had success doing the opposite — sagging off of the ball handler and turning him into a scorer.

In other words, each team’s coverage falls on a spectrum. That spectrum would look something like the following.

Intuitively, we know that a team like Houston is towards the right side of the spectrum. But using existing data, can we attempt to quantify where a team sits on the spectrum?

That question is the topic of today’s newsletter.