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How to hide and conceal the “Equal Opportunity Basketball Offense”! In my opinion any offense worth running should be concealed. The biggest problem in getting players to run a disciplined pattern is their normal desire to be free to make all their moves. If you start teaching them a mechanical pattern without fluidity or smoothness, they will balk every time. Concealments offer your players a smooth way to get into the equal opportunity basketball offense. Varied types of concealments enable you to get away from the mechanical type of execution used by many teams, today. Frankly, if your team has been well scouted, it will be difficult to get directly into an offense. The opponent will overplay your entry passes. If you use different concealments during the season, you can keep your opponents guessing while you continue to run the equal opportunity offense all season long. Because you start the offense from so many sets, many of your opposing coaches will think you have changed your entire offense. Concealments offer you the way of putting your own personal stamp on this offense. You may already have certain maneuvers that have always worked for your team. Perhaps you are not completely satisfied with your offense, but do not want to throw it out entirely. After reading this article you might easily find a way to blend it in with the equal opportunity offense. I’ll bet if you use this offense as your primary offense, but conceal it your opponents will swear you are running the “Princeton”, or some other popular pattern offense. You can teach the equal opportunity offense much better if you put a little of your own thinking into it. You will be more enthusiastic and so will your players. Opposing scouts will have to make many trips to understand your attack. We all know that any pattern well scouted is easier to defend. There is no need to give your half-court offense away completely by going down the floor and going right into it. There are two methods of concealing the equal opportunity offense. One I call “submissive” and the other, “enthusiastic”. Submissive indicates a simple method with little movement before getting into the pattern. I have already illustrated this method in an earlier article. This submissive type of concealment is actually part of the equal opportunity offense since we were using it in 1966; however, it is a concealment because we are not technically in the equal opportunity offense until we get into a 1-3-1 set. The 2-1-2 set and cut through by the weak-side guard is not a part of the equal opportunity offense, but a simple submissive camouflage (Diagrams 97 and 98). There are many other ways of concealing the equal opportunity offense. Any maneuver that has the potential to act as a scoring maneuver, or has natural movements that enable you to move to a 1-3-1 set may well be used as your concealment. I choose the plays originated by the great Adolph Rupp at Kentucky many years ago. Nearly every basketball coach in the world is familiar with them and I choose them because they represent a real scoring threat. Any concealment you may use should be run with good execution and a real effort to score off it occasionally. One of Rupp’s old plays you may use for concealment is the “guard-around” play (Diagrams 99 and 100). Please notice how the movement of each player carries him to a 1-3-1 natural equal opportunity offense position. Your concealment should not force any player to make any inefficient or unreasonable move that hurries him excessively. If your opposition has a big defensive post player and yours is much smaller, I prefer to use the version of the “guard-around” as shown in Diagrams 101 and 102. The big defender might be reluctant to move out to the head of the circle to defend and your post player might step out there for several open shots during a game. The “guard-opposite” play is similar but different enough to hurt the team that is set for the “guard-around”. It can be run with many variations, but I prefer the one illustrated in Diagram 103. I’m not showing the subsequent equal opportunity cuts since they have been given a great deal of attention in earlier articles. The second diagram shows the position from which you can go into the equal opportunity offense (Diagram 104). In this diagram, #4 would pass to #5, receive a screen from #1 and run the first cut. |
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