Description
Most players use the pick and roll to get a shot.
Better players use it to get a look.
Shooting the first shot you see off a pick and roll is normally the least efficient thing you can do. The screen just did the hard part. It bent the defense. One defender tags. Another skips over from the weak side. Somebody has to run at you.
That run is a closeout, and a closeout is a player who is out of position and moving fast.
The first closeout gets them rotating. The second closeout kills them.
And the defense tells you how to beat it. Watch the clips. Drop, switch, ice, blitz. Four different coverages, four different answers: the ball behind the big, the slip, the ball snaked back to the middle, the short roll. The coverage is not the obstacle. It is your solution.
Dick put the principle in STUFF Good Players Should Know: "It is much easier to score off the roll when the ball is coming from an angle past the screen, and the roller has the man he has screened firmly on his back."
Angle. Timing. A defender already committed to the wrong place.
So the next time a screen comes, don't ask "can I shoot this?" Ask "what is this defense giving me?"
Read the coverage. Then punish it.