Indiana Basketball: 3 ways to jumpstart the offense

Meaningful pick and rolls

When I played high school basketball, my coach told us time and time again, “Cut with purpose! Don’t just go through the motions!” It’s a common ailment of young players to fall victim to the line of thinking that cutting doesn’t earn you points and get into the mindset of, “If I’m not dribbling the ball, I can’t score,” especially when James Harden is playing on ESPN almost every week.

However, I have NEVER seen this happen with pick and rolls. It is usually understood when a pick and roll is performed that the defense is going to be forced to make a decision: either cover the roller and leave the ball handler with a more open shot, or cover the ball handler and leave the roller with an open sprint to the rim. Help defense can also come over and leave a shooter open. If performed correctly, someone is likely going to get a pretty good chance to score off a pick and roll. It’s a staple in elite offenses for a reason.

Indiana seems to not grasp this at any level, coaches or players. Archie Miller’s offense is full of meaningless, “go through the motions” picks that team that spends five minutes in the film room knows aren’t a threat. My high school coach would make us run sprints for stuff like this.

I know for a fact that coaching is a reason for this poor play, mainly because it’s happened on all three Archie Miller Indiana teams. If having a meaningful pick and roll game was important to Miller, he wouldn’t have let it slip through the cracks for three straight years. Yet it continues to be neglected – one of the reasons why Indiana may be the easiest team to scout in the Big Ten.

Pick and rolls don’t work for IU partly because the bigs don’t roll hard to the rim at all. The defense has no pressure put on it from the rim runner, which makes the screen largely ignored and ineffective. However, it’s hard to blame the bigs for not rolling hard, because most of the time when they DO roll hard, the guards don’t have the vision or passing ability to hit them.

The guards are at fault in other ways too. When a screen is set, they hardly ever even attempt to get downhill and go towards the basket. In every situation in basketball, attacking the defense and penetrating the lane is key. Make the defense commit to stopping the drive, and it frees up opportunities for other people. Indiana never does this, and so most pick and rolls just result in a kick out to a well-guarded perimeter player.

Trayce Jackson-Davis is a tremendous pick and roll player who gets to show off that part of his game about once every outing.

That quickness we talked about earlier, once again, going unused and wasted by not running effective pick and rolls. Indiana needs to experiment with isolating one of its ball handlers on the wing and using a high pick and roll with Trayce Jackson-Davis. It’s one more way for the Hoosiers to get their star player more involved, and it’s a strategy that has been used since the invention of basketball. For some reason, however, it doesn’t seem to be in Indiana’s playbook.