Coaches’ Corner- Shot Clock Strategy HS Coaches Need to Know

Illinois is adding the shot clock next year. Coaches begin to wonder what adjustments they will need to make for the shot clock. The obvious involves strategies defensively to slow the offense down- things like 3/4 court pressing and playing half-court zones. And offensively developing a strategy for late shot clock offense. 

While all of those are things coaches will need to think about, there is a late game strategy coaches MUST be aware of. 

Illinois in Blue, Iowa in Gold.

In Iowa vs Illinois game, Illinois had the lead with under 2 minutes to go. Iowa scored with 1:53 to go. With a 30 second shot clock, that means that Illinois could take the game clock down to 1:23 if they used the entire shot clock. Correct? Nope!

In college if the game clock was under 1:00 minute, the game clock would stop on the make. (High school basketball does not have the game clock ever automatically stop.) So on the make, Illinois allows the ball to bounce around out of bounds, walks to pick it up. This effectively uses up 5-7 seconds. (In this case, the Iowa player actually allows this to happen by grabbing the ball after the make.)

Then Illinois rolls the ball inbounds so they avoid a 5 second violation on the inbounding, but the shot clock does NOT start until the player picks up the ball. This picture shows the ball still rolling and the game clock has ticked down to 1:42 but the shot clock still has not started. 

The point at which Illinois finally picked up the ball was at 1:40 on the game clock. When the ball originally went thru the net, the shot clock would have gone off at 1:23 on the game clock. By being slow inbounding the ball and rolling the ball, the shot clock will not expire until 1:10. 

Using this strategy, Illinois effectively shortened the game by 13 seconds!!