The Growth of the Pick and Roll in College Basketball and Value to Teams Offensive Success
Practices officially begin on Friday with Midnight Madness happening on both October 6 and October 13 depending what school you’re looking at. So with the season here, it’s officially preview season and we’ll be looking at a bunch of different things heading into the season. There will be the traditional top-25, best players list, conference previews and all that jazz, but we’ll also go more in depth, looking at different offensive and defensive sets and what makes teams so consistently good. We looked at baseline out of bounds last week and we’ll do more of that stuff as we get ready for the season to start. Any specific preview you’re hoping to see, let me know @barstoolreags
Today I want to look at the growth of pick-and-roll and just how important it is in the college game. This has now become the most used set play, especially with the development of bigs at the college game to where it’s a threat to not only be a pick and roll, but a pick and pop. We’re seeing teams in the pick and roll set over 25% of the time on offense, meaning if you’re scoring out of this set, you’re likely one of the better offenses in the country.
As a standard with these specific breakdowns, I’m just going to focus on the power six conferences and use the last five years for data. That’s enough data to show a trend and really see who is excelling in this set. Also going to keep the standard of points per possession for this, so it takes out pace and everything like that. To me points per possession is the most fair and the most accurate judge of how successful an offense is, because teams can slow it down defensively or speed it up. Either way, if you’re scoring more often when you touch the ball than not, you’re usually a decent team.
So with this I want to look at the way these successful teams run the pick and roll. I know it might some mundane, but there are a variety of sets to run this out of while also being a tool for some of those daytime overs. With the growth of the pick and roll, it’s worth looking at these teams vs those that struggle defensively against it when it comes time to bet in a few weeks. So who are the 10 best teams running the pick and roll over the last five years?
I don’t think there’s a real surprise here in this list. The top five teams match the same top five best offenses per PPP that we looked at late last week, just in a different order. Iowa State was so successful with the pick and roll because they had a point guard for four years who could beat you three different ways. Monte Morris has the ability to beat you with the pass, the midrange jumper or at the rim. Throw in the fact they’d run the PnR with guys like Georges Niang or Deonte Burton, who were hybrid type forwards instead of traditional bigs gave it even more of an interesting look. On top of that, they surrounded the PnR with shooters like Matt Thomas and Naz Long.
What I enjoy watching about Iowa State’s pick and roll is the way they get into the set. It’s not the traditional pass to wing then have a guy come set a side screen or high ball screen. They are a team – whether it was under Hoiberg or Prohm – that likes to get out in transition. They’d use the PnR for secondary breaks or then out of a set. One of the sets Iowa State will run this out of is the floppy set. Morris makes a pass to the wing then cuts down under the basket. You have your big alone on one block and your wing and opposite big on the opposite side. Morris can then make a read to run off either side of screens. Here you can see against Iona a couple years back you can see the floppy set. The first read is for Morris to either curl off the screen or go all the way through.
After Morris cuts through, it lets Thomas run off the screen set by the opposite big to the corner giving another look for three. Once Morris catches the ball, the 2 guard drifts opposite side for a kick out and Burton comes up to the set the side ball screen. It’s a fairly simple play, but when you have an offense like Iowa State, it keeps teams honest. You can’t cheat off a shooter and you can’t jump the screen. Here’s the full play below.
Last year, Iowa State would run a similar set but the play design was to get Morris a little more further down on the wing and set a side screen. The play was a similar design to the floppy set except with just one screener on each side. You can see the look here:
With the 2-3 look, you can see how much space Morris has to operate. Again, he can choose which side he runs off of as both bigs are there to set the screen. Once the pass starts to reverse court to Thomas, he runs off ball side screen to the short corner. That allows him and Burton to play PnR with basically an entire half of the floor. After Burton sets the first screen, he then turns – and more importantly – waits until Morris is in position before taking a step up and setting another screen. Here’s the whole play developing:
Creighton runs the pick and roll about 9% of the time more than Iowa State and runs it in a completely different set. They don’t typically run a floppy set to the get the ball to a ball handler. They will get creative with their screens and look to pick and pop a lot. That was especially the case when they had Ethan Wragge and Doug McDermott, two guys who could set the screen and shoot the hell out of the ball. When they had both guys on the court, they would run a lot of double high ball screens.
What Greg McDermott loves to do is set a bunch of screens all over the floor to get the set going. He’ll run guys off of down screens and curl screens. But, the set that I absolutely love that he does is this double high delayed ball screen. Here’s a set that they ran quite a bit when they had Doug McDermott. They still do run this set obviously, but, when you’re talking about a ton of success with it, it was when they had two shooters. The premise was McDermott would often pop for the three and the opposing big would slip to the post.
This play was such a beautiful design, they ran it four consecutive plays against Xavier. They scored all four times. The reason why is because you had to pay so much attention to what McDermott was doing that it often led to defenses getting out of position. Watch two of the possessions below. One leads to a layup. One leads to a McDermott three.
Arizona is another team that has been successful running the pick and roll and ran it quite a bit – 31.6% when looking at passes out of the PnR. That number is going to go up because of the hire of Lorenzo Romar to be an assistant coach. The pace of play should go up a little bit for Arizona, one of the slowest teams in the country, but they will run pick and roll all day. The key here with this, is not only should Arizona be even better offensively, but look for them to start going after more point guards. Romar has had success with guards at Washington in terms of getting them to the NBA. Now, throw in the fact he has Sean Miller as a head coach and the name Arizona, it should be even easier.
What I’m curious to see with Arizona is how they adjust their pick and roll sets. Last year with Lauri Markkanen playing the role of Doug McDermott, they somewhat mimicked what Creighton did. They’d bring both bigs up for a screen. However, as we saw Creighton set a double ball screen, Arizona was in the traditional horns set with a big on each side. You can see that look here
What made this effective was the play of Markkanen. Much like McDermott, you had to respect his shooting, but Lauri was also talented enough to roll to the post for either a midrange shot or to finish at the rim.
All in all the pick and roll is an incredibly important part to college basketball. Teams are running this more and more each year and the development of bigs being able to step out and pick and pop is changing the game. Keep an eye this year early on at what teams are not only running this set a lot, but how successful they are. Again, the top-5 offensive teams in points per possession over the last 5 years are also the five best pick and roll teams.