X/O’s: Changing Up Your Ball Screen Offense

Sometimes an opponent makes it hard to run your normal ball screen actions- middle ball screens, side ball screens, and drag screens. 

Defenses may disrupt the ball screens with hard hedges, trapping, or aggressive switching. All three of these actions can put quick, aggressive pressure on the dribbler that makes it hard for them to continue their dribble and makes it difficult to make a pass to the screener who can be rolling or popping. 

Ghost Screen Action

An action used by many offenses is to run a decent shooter or ball handler at the ball, and run a ghost screen. This can create confusion for the defense. The dribbler wants to be able to make the pass out to the ghost early before any possible trap action. 

The ghost wants to be put in a position where if they don’t have a shot, they have drive option to score, dump, or kick to shooter. 

Flash or Get Action

One of the best tools to have to combat aggressive screen defense is a flash cut by the dribbler. Where ever you would want to set the ball screen action, that is where you want to post (any player) to get open to catch a pass from the dribbler. 

In this case, trying to set up location similar to a drag screen. But we want the post to catch the ball closer to the basket. On the pass, the passer is going to make a Flash Cut to get a handoff back. So instead of dribbling off the ball screen, the player is cutting off the ball. 

But it still leads to the same reads and actions as one would get in a ball screen. A huge difference is that the screener has the ball. The if in screen defense, the defense wants to jump or trap the dribbler, in this case if they do that, the “screener with the ball”, can just fake the handoff and go. 

Sometime the defense will adjust and try to have the defender on the cutter fight to go over the screen. In this case, you see the pros all automatically curl off the “screener” and can get open going to the basket.

If you have a chance to watch clips of Indiana Fever, with Mitchell and Clark as dribblers- they have used the Flash action because of how much opponents jump on them coming off screens. Boston constantly gets open with the fake handoff. 

I would suggest that coaches play with their ball screen offense. Ask yourself, how can I put in a GHOST ACTION or a GET ACTION to punish aggressive ball screen defense.