From Ron Rangi:

Just a note to let you know we are still working on the Read and React Offense but we are amazed with the result to date.

We are currently 1-1 in our League standings and 3-1 for all games played so far. Last year, our Point Guard, Small Forward and Centre dominated scoring, contributing just under two thirds of the total points per game. However this year, we have seen a dramatic change in the scoring spread. 9 of the 11 players on my roster have scored, 6 have scored in double digits and of them, 3 have had 20+ point games. Our single loss, 62-70, was a 4th quarter comeback that was plagued in hindsight by some poor time and player management by yours truly. However I digress.

Although we are technically up to the Backscreen layer in our teaching of R&R, our team is only instinctively playing at the Speed Dribble layer. This meant we had no real Zone Offense heading into this season and had to put one in fairly quickly since our next opponent is 2-3 Zone team. We are blessed with two very strong Post players so we wanted to make the most of them while keeping things very simple to learn and execute.

We decided to go 3-out with 2 fixed posts starting below the FIBA block and integrate movement that looks like the following:

1. On the Entry Pass to the Wing , the Ball-side Post pops out to the corner. The Weak-side Post goes to the High Post. The Point would shallow cut weakside keeping to our pass and cut rules.

2. The Wing passes to the Corner Post and makes her Basket cut looking for the return pass.

3. We have the High Post come straight off her coat tails looking for the pass from the Corner. If she doesn’t get it, she circles back to the high post again using the small circle inside the bigger circle as a means to reinforce the movement.

4. If the Corner is a good 1-on-1 player or shooter, we will then let her have a go, else we will look to reverse the ball. Ball reversal is the sign for the Post to move back to their home spots.

5. The only adjustment we made was when the ball goes from Wing to Top, the Wing has a choice to (a) speed dribble to the top causing a shallow cut Ballside or (b) Pass to Top and v-cut replacing herself. We needed to do this to stop the Wing basket cutting and filling the corner when the ball was being reversed.

The beauty was how fast we got this up and running and into scrimmage. From the initial instruction at our courtside whiteboard to working scrimmage, 40 minutes.

But let me qualify this, we have been running 5-out pass and cut almost all pre-season. There was very little needed to make this offense work except the repositioning of the Post and getting their movement in time with the passes.

Once in place, it was just a matter of execution. However because we have run 5-out pass and cut for close to three months now, the onus was more on the Post to get their stuff right.

Once done, we ran it several times against our 2-3 Zone and it has worked a treat. Even after scrimmage, we were starting to see some interesting screen options open up, but we will explore that in due course.

Anyway, I thought I would share this with you and community who are looking for a quick hitting, simple continuity solution for zone offense.

Rick’s Response:

Thanks for sharing everything that you did. If you don’t, I’ll never hear about it. It gives me great pleasure to hear such good news.

I’m not surprised at how quickly you were able to adopt a working zone offense. Once the players are familiar with the R&R terminology for basketball actions and once they become familiar with the scoring situations that you are trying to create for them, I think it becomes easy to do what you did. Players and coaches on the same page makes for some very efficient and effective basketball.

Your hybrid between a set zone offense and the R&R is the type of creativity that I knew would happen when the R&R gets into the hands of someone like yourself. I’ll bet that your zone offense eventually evolves into pure R&R as the players absorb the rest of the offense.