A ball swing refers to when a team on offense moves the ball from one side of the floor to the other naturally through the passes in their offense. Ball swings are a valuable means of creating scoring opportunities for a team because of what they do to the defense. On every pass that is made the defense has to move to adjust. The problem for every defense is that each time the ball moves so do the players. When the ball moves, the offensive team typically moves within 1 second of the pass. When that happens the defense has to move not only in relation to the individuals each defender is responsible for guarding, but also in relation to the ball. The more passes that are made means more adjustments that each defender has to make. Conceptually this is not a difficult task but practically it is. The vast majority of players on defense will move closer and closer to the person they are guarding with each pass that is made but defenders most often default to guarding their man (even though the ball is the only thing that can score). This means that they are further and further away from being in a good position to help the person guarding the ball. So, knowing this, the more a team moves the ball, the better scoring opportunities a team will give itself because the floor will open up as the defense gets closer and closer to the person they are guarding. Taking that one step further, the more we move the ball over further distances, like those that ball swings give us, the better scoring opportunities a team will give itself.
When I first started coaching I didn’t fully understand this principle. I could tell you that making ball swings was a good offensive principle but I wasn’t conscious of the why of it. I would normally have my team perform 10 passes when practicing their motion offensive sets which would normally force us to swing the ball throughout those 10 passes. It wasn’t until later in my coaching career that I came to understand what happens to the defense when the opposition is swinging the ball. When our association adopted a shot clock it no longer made sense for our team to make 10 passes when practicing as we would never be on offense that long without a shot. What we converted to was three ball swings within the shot clock. This was also helpful for our players to get a feel for how much time they had to work with before they knew they had to create a shot before the shot clock ran out. We still got out of our offense what we did previously with the ten passes but now we understood better what we were doing and why it was effective.
No matter what offense you run, getting the ball moving from one side of the floor to the other and back is an effective way of creating good scoring opportunities. Most players want to come down and attack on the side they initiate the offense to. It takes a coach to discipline their team to move the ball within the restraints of their associations rules, to maximize their scoring potential. Be patient at the offensive end, it will pay your team dividends.
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