NBA playoffs 2021: Why the pick-and-roll is the single most important play in the NBA

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 2004, a couple of months after point guard Steve Nash signed with the Phoenix Suns, he joined some of his new teammates at the team's arena for some 5-on-5 pickup.

Forward Amar'e Stoudemire, coming into his third year, had arrived in impeccable shape. And from the moment he took the floor with Nash in that hot gym in late summer, the two cultivated an immediate rapport with the most ordinary of two-man actions.

"It was magical," Stoudemire says now. "It was happening so easily for us. The way Steve was reading the defense and playing the offense, and the way I was being forceful around the basket ... He was making these brilliant passes, and I was attacking the rim. We knew at that point that we were going to be a really good team because Steve and I started to develop chemistry that was unheard of."

New coach Mike D'Antoni, general manager Bryan Colangelo and various members of their respective staffs would drop into the gym to observe the games and catch a glimpse of how their new point guard might supercharge a Suns offense that had ranked 21st in offensive efficiency the previous season.

The pick-and-roll had been around for decades, but it had historically been more complementary than foundational. What Nash and Stoudemire were choreographing in that gym was a revelation. They ran the pick-and-roll at full speed in transition, as well as in the half-court with an alacrity rarely seen. To onlookers, it seemed like a preordained playcall, because their movement was so decisive. Yet Stoudemire's screens were entirely improvisational; this was nothing more than a pickup game.

"Amar'e and I found a chemistry," Nash says. "You could see him setting the drag or coming around and setting high pick-and-roll. I'd manipulate the defense from there."

Months later, Nash and Stoudemire would take their show to the regular-season stage: A Phoenix offense predicated almost entirely on the high pick-and-roll would rank first overall in efficiency, scoring more points per 100 possessions than any team since the NBA began tracking in 1996-97.

Some 10 years later, a high school freshman popped in a DVD in the game room of his family's home in Norman, Oklahoma, to study. Though there was no facsimile of Amar'e Stoudemire at the YMCA in Norman, Trae Young would try to approximate those early pick-and-rolls with whichever big man was game for it. Once he arrived at Oklahoma to lead the Sooners, he enlisted center Jamuni McNeace as a roll man who could provide Young sufficient space to throw a lob for an alley-oop or slither into the lane for a floater.

One day in late 2017, during a Sooners' 10-game winning streak, Young received a lengthy text message. It was from Nash. In disbelief, Young showed it to teammate Kameron McGusty because he thought it might be fake.

It was real. Nash wrote to Young to let him know he was watching and to encourage him to stay true to his game.

What Nash didn't know -- nor the other "Seven Seconds or Less" Suns -- was that their open runs in September 2004 were laboratory work: research and development that would be produced by the entire NBA as a generic drug.

Unbeknownst to the Suns, Nash, Stoudemire and the other guys in that gym were launching a revolution in which the high pick-and-roll would evolve from novelty to staple to centerpiece. Along the way, it launched new offensive and defensive trends. It reassessed the value of many players. It changed the very look of the game. Like any powerful narcotic, the high-pick-and-roll is now a source of dependence, one the league can't live without.

THE NBA IS a living, breathing organism whose characters change perceptibly over time. Watch a game from the 1990s and the contours of the shooting strokes are no different. A live ball turnover that leads to a fast break then an emphatic slam still sends the crowd in the bowl and teammates on the bench into a frenzy. But when things slow down in the half court, the flow of the ball and spacing of the players can seem like a relic from a time capsule. In possession after possession, a big man roosts on the block with a big paw in the air awaiting an entry pass. Quite often, a defense will appear to be entirely indifferent to defending the floor beyond 19 feet.

Something else you'll see far less frequently in those 1990s contests: anything that looks remotely like today when the Atlanta Hawks' Young, Dallas Mavericks' Luka Doncic or Portland Trail Blazers' Damian Lillard get a high screen 25 feet from the basket. Each uses the screen differently in service of different outcomes, but each received more than 2,800 screens above the 3-point line break this season, according to Second Spectrum tracking.

As is the case with regard to pace -- another defining trend of the era -- the Suns were revolutionaries, disruptors in the marketplace of NBA offense 16 years ago. Today, they'd be extreme traditionalists.

During the 2004-05 season, Nash's first with the Suns, 22% of their finished plays were generated by a pick-and-roll, by far a league-high. Just one other team, the Seattle SuperSonics, finished with more than 20%.

Five years later, 20 teams ran pick-and-rolls at least 20% of the time, per Synergy Sports. Four years after that, it was all 30.

Today, the innovating stylings of Nash, Stoudemire and D'Antoni -- their 22% -- would rank dead last in the league by a huge margin; not a single team relied on pick-and-rolls less than 25% of the time.

Lillard remembers studying the NBA's best point guards -- including Nash, Tony Parker, John Stockton, Jason Kidd and Deron Williams -- during an offseason at the behest of his Weber State assistant coach Phil Beckner, who still works closely with Lillard as a private player development coach.

Lillard recalls his teams easing into a pick-and-roll offense during his tenure at Weber State. As he gained proficiency, the Wildcats would rely on it during crucial stretches late in games, crafting their attack around a talent that would make him the No. 6 overall pick in the 2012 draft from a relatively obscure Big Sky program.

"The last seven or eight minutes of the game, we would run pick-and-rolls to death," Lillard says. "I was always in it. I started to feel so comfortable and confident in those situations and making plays and scoring, just manipulating the defense out of the pick-and-roll. That became our bread and butter my last two years at Weber.

"Around that time, I knew: Once I get to the league and I'm playing with NBA-level players and shooters, high-level athletes out there, I'll be able to manipulate it and do things on an even different level. That's pretty much how it's happened."

While Lillard was feasting on opposing defenses during his final season in the NCAA, the average NBA offense was finishing a play with a pick-and-roll 25% of the time, according to Synergy Sports tracking. By 2016-17, when Lillard was starting a max extension with the Blazers, that number had spiked to 33% -- where it remains today.

Although the rate of pick-and-rolls has flattened out in the NBA -- a product of growing diversity in how teams get their shots -- the league's premier pick-and-roll ball handlers are running the play more often than ever. During 2020-21, Young and Doncic both ran more pick-and-rolls per 100 possessions than any starter in the previous seven seasons with camera tracking, per Second Spectrum.

Just as Lillard sensed when he was on the doorstep of the NBA, Young, Doncic and any other perimeter player entering the league knows pick-and-roll dominance is their ticket to stardom. Master it and NBA glory can be yours.

THE PICK-AND-ROLL is the NBA's most recent trend, but there's very little that's new about it. Like every revolutionary innovation, the pick-and-roll had its early adopters and high-profile influencers: Bob Cousy and Bill Russell; Oscar Robertson and Wayne Embry; Stockton and Karl Malone.

The evolution of the pick-and-roll has been from a trusted playcall into an offense in and of itself. Hall of Famer Isiah Thomas and his two-time champion Detroit Pistons, better remembered for their "Jordan Rules" defense than their Thomas-led offense, were at the leading edge of that movement.

"Chuck Daly's Pistons teams were the first to use it consistently at a high frequency," says Indiana Pacers coach Rick Carlisle. "The mid pick-and-roll with Isiah Thomas handling and Bill Laimbeer popping was murder."

Thomas' early teams in Detroit featured a platoon of centers and forwards with proficient midrange games. As Thomas logged more time on the floor with Laimbeer, Kent Benson and Kelly Tripucka, the group realized that a pick-and-roll -- even if the "roll" was a lateral "pop" to the perimeter -- generated quality looks from midrange.

"It was never seen or used as a system often that you can win a basketball game with and play through a season and seasons with or have a NBA pro career with," Thomas says. "It was seen as a play. But we made it a system."

Detroit aside, teams found it easier to create matchup advantages by letting their stars work one-on-one in the post or in isolations in an era when the NBA's illegal defense rules prevented any form of zone defense. That forced coaches to choose between keeping all five players matched up or sending a full double-team at a single player, not allowing defenders to cheat off their man to provide help as easily or aggressively as they can now.

"I don't remember ever, in my first three or four years of coaching the Lakers, that we ever ran any pick-and-rolls," said Miami Heat president Pat Riley in 2018, while discussing the small-ball trend. "We ran the break, we ran post-ups for [James] Worthy and Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] and catch-and-shoots for Byron Scott. That was it. We didn't start running pick-and-rolls until after '85 -- '86 or '87 when Kareem got a little bit older. We'd get Magic [Johnson] involved a little bit, but it just wasn't part of the game."

The same rule changes in the early 2000s that catalyzed teams playing at faster pace also facilitated the growth of the pick-and-roll. That started when illegal defense was eliminated in 2001, allowing zones and making isolations and post-ups less profitable for teams. It accelerated dramatically in 2004 when the league stepped up enforcement of an existing rule prohibiting handchecking on the perimeter. Without defenders steering them on the perimeter, guards suddenly found the lane wide open for their drives after getting a screen on the perimeter.

With Nash, a skilled, dynamic finisher in Stoudemire and small lineups that took a traditional center off the court in favor of more shooting at the other three positions, Phoenix was ideally suited to take advantage of the more favorable conditions.

"It was magical ... He was making these brilliant passes, and I was attacking the rim. We knew at that point that we were going to be a really good team." Amar'e Stoudemire, on his early Suns pick-and-roll with Steve Nash

Soon other teams would follow suit and find new dimensions for pick-and-roll basketball. As with any trend in the past two decades, the San Antonio Spurs played a prominent role. Despite beating Nash's Suns in key playoff matchups in 2005, 2007 and 2008, the Spurs soon came to resemble Phoenix as they rebuilt their offense around Parker. From 2008-09 through 2011-12, no team ran pick-and-roll as frequently as San Antonio.

Over time, the NBA's pick-and-roll focus trickled down to lower levels. In 2012-13, the first year Synergy fully tracked Division I men's college basketball, 17% of plays ended with pick-and-rolls. Last season, that had jumped to 27%.

A new generation of point guards was watching the broadcasts and, in Young's case, studying the film in their rec rooms and with their coaches. Like Advanced Placement students taking calculus in high school, they'd knock those credits out early and show up at the next level as savants.

SPOT A CURRENT trend in NBA basketball and there's a good chance the pick-and-roll gave rise to it. The supremacy of the 3-ball. Doncic finishing fourth in MVP voting in only his second season. The ascension of the Player Who Can Guard Multiple Positions. The Hawks crashing the postseason party. How did this all come to be?

You can't answer key questions about the modern NBA without starting at the pick-and-roll.

Why are NBA offenses historically efficient?

This season was the fourth in the past five during which the NBA set a new record for leaguewide offensive efficiency, and the pace only seems to be accelerating. In 2019-20, the Mavericks posted the highest offensive rating on record at 116 points per 100 possessions. This season, seven teams -- nearly a quarter of the league -- beat that mark. While there are several contributing factors to the scoring revolution of the past half-decade, the pick-and-roll is undoubtedly producing more prolific offenses.

Consider what the pick-and-roll has replaced: Although the rates of most other plays tracked by Synergy Sports have remained steady, those extra pick-and-rolls came at the expense of the isolation and post-up plays that defined the NBA in the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2004-05, 28% of plays concluded through a post-up or isolation, about equally split between the two. By this season, that had shrunk by half -- to less than 15% of plays.

Performance on pick-and-rolls also helps determine teams' success on offense. During the eight seasons for which we have camera tracking data, six of the 10 teams that have scored most efficiently in pick-and-rolls -- a group including the Mavericks, Brooklyn Nets and Utah Jazz this season -- have also been among the 10 best offenses in that span, per Second Spectrum.

In other words: Good pick-and-roll offense has become good offense, full stop.

Almost all of this generation's superstars are perimeter ball handlers?

When Nikola Jokic was named MVP this season, he was the first center to win the award since Shaquille O'Neal in 1999-00. That's a sea change from the first four decades of the MVP, when a majority of the winners were big men who were set up by teammates in the post.

The NBA's brightest stars are now ball handlers who can control a game by running pick-and-roll basketball. Having one is all but a necessity for a championship team. The emerging generation of NBA stars, led by Doncic and Young, are seasoned practitioners of the pick-and-roll whose skills are elevated by increasingly complex pick-and-roll design.

Young and the Hawks, for their part, have fashioned a double-drag screen, the Big Gulp of pick-and-rolls. They aren't the first -- several teams that have a quality shooter at the 4 and an elite rim runner at the 5 have run it -- but with Young at the controls and John Collins and Clint Capela as the screeners, the Hawks have made it more appealing than ever.

"The set is hard to defend because you have every option," Young says. "You've got two shooters on the floor in the corner. You have a guy like [Collins] who can shoot the ball, and he's the first screener. If I'm able to get over both screens and get downhill, I have basically every option. And if not every option, there is going to be an option open.

"Whether it's [Collins'] man helping just a little too long in getting back to him where he can shoot a 3 or if Clint's man steps up, then I have the lob. Or if the opposite shooter's man helps in on Clint's roll, then I can hit him for a 3. There are so many options, you can't necessarily guard every one. It's on the point guard to make the right read."

Increasingly they are. The average direct pick-and-roll produces 8% more points than five seasons ago, according to Second Spectrum, a bigger increase than we've seen in overall offensive efficiency.

That's why the pick-and-roll is the oxygen inside just about every film session, coaches' meeting and walk-through. Even those teams that use it less frequently, including the Golden State Warriors and the Milwaukee Bucks, still have to defend it. And those who have trouble defending it, like Atlanta and Portland, can exact revenge with their actions on the other end.

"It's so difficult to guard with the confluence of the rules, spacing and the 3-point shooting, and how you guard it -- switch, blitz, a corral -- determines what gets created," Nash says.

What's with all the switching on defense?

Pick-and-roll is a starting point for how modern coaches approach their defensive schemes: How will we defend the pick-and-roll? is the bedrock of any team defense.

Increasingly, the answer coaches are coming to is switching, which means precisely what it suggests: The two defenders in the pick-and-roll switch assignments. The late Flip Saunders was an early pioneer of switching, and the Warriors popularized it with their championship defense. In 2013-14, the first season of camera tracking, teams switched just 8% of pick-and-rolls, according to Second Spectrum data. That's now more than doubled to 19% of pick-and-rolls this season.

Switching is the easiest way for the defense to defend the two players involved in the pick-and-roll with the same number of defenders, avoiding the risk of bringing an extra defender and having to rotate back to open shooters. Switching continues to proliferate because the high pick-and-roll has simply become too lethal.

"What's happened with the high pick-and-roll -- or just pick-and-rolls, in general: The biggest enhancement is the evolution and improvement of perimeter players' ballhandling skills," Riley says. "The ballhandling skills are off the charts for the great players, even more so than the increased shooting percentages from the 3. It's the ballhandling skills in how they dribble-dance and how they can get there one way or the other."

Those skills enable guards to find daylight against recovering defenders and, as Riley says, get there one way or the other. Today, scoring off a high screen doesn't even require the commute. With just a modicum of space and a passable step-back move, guards can launch a 3-pointer before the defenders can look up -- and quite often, so can the screener.

"I would probably say the easiest one to play against is when you're playing against a big that's not very mobile and they've got to be dropped back," Lillard says, "so they can't really put any pressure or resistance on you coming off a pick-and-roll. So, I would say the drop ... no chance. That one is easy to pick apart because it's like they're at your mercy. You can kind of have what you want."

Run into the wrong pick-and-roll ball handler at the wrong time and the drop coverage can go from strength to liability, requiring more flexibility on defense.

"It will get to a point where if you don't switch or have the ability to switch, you're asking for a lot of problems," says Nets assistant coach D'Antoni.

The best lineup in recent memory, the Warriors' "Death Lineup," featuring 6-foot-6 Draymond Green at center, excelled defensively because of the ability to switch any pick without conceding an advantage. When Green played center, according to Second Spectrum, Golden State switched a remarkable 38% of picks during their five consecutive NBA Finals runs from 2015 through 2019.

Like the Warriors' traditional centers replaced by Green in the Death Lineup, even the best defensive centers find it challenging to stay on the court when teams feel they need to switch everything.

Game 1 of these Eastern Conference finals was such a moment. Because Young was able to repeatedly beat the Bucks' drop coverage with floaters, Bucks coach Mike Budenholzer pulled center Brook Lopez -- an NBA All-Defensive Second Team pick in 2019-20 -- for the fourth quarter in favor of a lineup with Giannis Antetokounmpo as the biggest player, enabling Milwaukee to switch picks and force Young to beat them one-on-one.

Isolations are back?!

We associate isolation play with the 1990s style that pick-and-roll basketball displaced. However, like fashion from the '90s, isolations are back in style. They've increased on a per-possession basis every season since camera tracking began in 2013-14, according to Second Spectrum. That too is a downstream effect of the high pick-and-roll, by way of the switch.

Because a switching defense doesn't present the usual opportunity for the ball handler to make a play coming off a pick-and-roll, offenses often are forced into isolation basketball, instead -- only this time against a less capable defender than the original matchups at the start of a possession.

"It will get to a point where if you don't switch or have the ability to switch, you're asking for a lot of problems." Nets assistant coach Mike D'Antoni, who coached Stoudemire and Nash in Phoenix

Against a switching defense, the offensive player essentially gets to order a defender off a menu. Whether he has a taste for a less mobile big man that he can get on roller skates or just a weaker perimeter defender (think about Doncic in 2020 choosing the LA Clippers' Lou Williams in the first round), the offensive player selects the least effective individual defender and calls his man up to set a screen. The ball handler then goes to work in isolation against what he perceives to be the most favorable mismatch. The relatively new nomenclature for this in the NBA is "pick on," as in, "Which defender do we want to pick on?"

Once he finds his victim, the pick-and-roll assassin uses iso-ball as his weapon. Ten years ago, "iso" was an indictment of a scorer's perceived selfishness or lack of creativity. In the heydey of the pick-and-roll, it's just best practice.

Analytics isn't the only reason teams shoot so many 3s?

The explosion in 3-point shooting is the most pronounced trend in the NBA over the past decade, but the 3-point revolution didn't occur in a vacuum. Part of the reason? You guessed it. The high pick-and-roll.

"One thing that triggers these [3-point] shots is penetration off the pick-and-roll," says Pistons coach Dwane Casey. "The spacing is inflated and the defense stretched."

With ball handlers more capable than ever and freedom of movement the letter of the law, pick-and-roll defenders frequently need help. If there are three shooters spread along the arc, that help must come from the perimeter, which means at least one of them will be left open for a 3-point attempt.

The Suns teams of the aughts recognized this and maximized Nash and Stoudemire by playing Shawn Marion at power forward rather than his natural small forward, making room for two shooters (Joe Johnson and Quentin Richardson during 2004-05) to space the floor.

"I wasn't a conventional 5, and I did not want to play the 5," Stoudemire says. "But I respected Mike D'Antoni's decision, and I went along with it. And Shawn became a power forward, and he didn't want to play the 4, but he also respected Coach D'Antoni's decision. We all went along with it, and it worked out for the best. And I think us being able to use our quickness and our agility to take advantage of our defenders helped us out a lot."

D'Antoni has lamented that his Phoenix teams didn't yet have statistical support for their style of play, which would come only after the fact, as the NBA's embrace of data showed the value of shooting 3s and the rest of the league followed suit. Still, the two teams that shot the most 3s in the NBA in 2004-05 were the Suns and Sonics -- also the top two teams in using pick-and-rolls.

Statistical analysis has made teams crave 3s. Pick-and-roll is the method they used to create them -- just like so many other trends with the modern NBA.

TWO DAYS BEFORE the new year at Barclays Center, Young faced off against the Nets in Nash's fourth game as an NBA head coach. For more than three quarters, Young had tormented Brooklyn's defenders as they pursued him over and through the high pick-and-roll by slamming on the brakes. In the second quarter, Nets guard Landry Shamet rear-ended Young after squeezing past Hawks big man Bruno Fernando. Then in the fourth quarter of a two-point game, Kyrie Irving fell victim when Young stopped short on his drive.

Almost as if to prove a point, Young again toyed with the Nets on the very next possession, this time by deking Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot into a backside collision.

"You can't go backwards!" Nash yelled from the sideline as Young stepped to the line for his 13th and 14th free throw attempts of the game, before sliding his face mask down to plead more directly with referee Jason Goldenberg: "You can't do that. It's not basketball. It's not basketball!"

Listening to one of his boyhood heroes moan about his profiteering at the expense of the rulebook, Young flashed an impish smile. He would later say, "I bet if I was playing for Steve, he'd be happy."

In mid-June, the NBA's competition committee met to discuss preventing players like Young from drawing contact by contorting their bodies backward or sideways. It's just another proximate effect of a play that is the incarnation of everything we love and hate about NBA basketball.

The high pick-and-roll is a totalizing system that absorbs everything into its orbit. Any guard who can't execute it offers limited utility in an offense, and any big man who can't defend it should expect to be waving a towel from the bench during crunch time. The more capably an offense runs it, the more proficient their outside shooting. And the better a team stops it at the point of attack, the less vulnerable the rest of their defense.

The high pick-and-roll, in a real sense, is player empowerment -- a way for the most creative scorers to initiate the action without an elaborate playcall from the coach on the sideline. So is the blitz, the corral, the pocket pass, hunting mismatches and hunting fouls. So is the surround-him-with-shooters school of team building, the proliferation of the stretch-4 and the floater. It is an all-encompassing belief system.

Says Nash, "It's all pick-and-roll."