For the last almost two seasons I’ve been the head coach of the Aalborg Vikings in the Basketball League in Denmark, Europe. I took over mid-season for the first year, and we weren’t able to run the Dribble Drive, as we had to focus on defense.
For year two we started out running the Dribble Drive but mid season we replaced our import players with three new ones. I didn’t think we’d have time to teach it to the new players in time for the playoffs, so we went with set plays.
However, we ran a lot of set plays and quick hitters out of the Dribble Drive formation, as we were already used to playing out of that set.
Now I’ve made the transition to the GM job in the club, so I’m going to share the best of those quick hitters with you this summer. Some are in the Dribble Drive book I published, but this first one is not.
Zone Lob Play
This is a very simple screen-the-zone alley-oop lob play against most zones except the 1-3-1. One TV-announcer told me this season that he couldn’t figure out why the other teams didn’t catch on to it, as we used it every time we faced zone defense.
The answer to that question is in the deception. All of the real action takes place behind the defense and away from the ball:
Diagrammed it looks like this:
I don’t claim that the way we’re running the dribble drive is much different than what other people runs – in fact most of it is just taking the best of Walberg’s and Calipari’s options and combining them. We do try to look out for new options, though, and a few of them end up being part of the way we run the offense.