SF Advantage. South America 2012

I'm watching the South American Championship these days. There are very good teams and very good players and coaches.

Here I bring a nice situation Argentina started playing against Venezuela to get an advantage for their small forward Marcos Mata (he'll be well known soon) who is much bigger and stronger than his defender Jose Vargas.

Argentina place their "4" at the corner (Leo Gutierrez, a hell of a shooter) and are supposed to look for their "3" inside. You can even hear how they tell Vargas to fight against Mata's posting up from the Venezuela's bench.

Instead, in the first play, Mata will surprise the defenders by faking the hand off pass but driving hard towards the basket. As we said, Leo Gutierrez is right in the corner so his defender can't take the risk of a long help.

In the next offense, they run the same situation, but this time they do look for Mata inside. He gives the hand off pass, and then they run a pick and roll situation. As we can see, their "5" (Leiva) clears out the low post so Mata can go to work against Vargas. Right spacing, and Mata scores again.

LEB Gold: Axarquía

To begin with a series of posts in which I’ll bring you some details of the LEB Gold league and its teams, I’ve chosen Axarquia, Unicaja’s “farm team”. They place there some of their best prospects and make them grow in a really hard competition, against very good Spanish and foreign players.

Young players as Carlos Cobos (a PG about whom you’ll hear in the near future) Jhornan Zamora, Alvaro Martínez, Pablo Almazán, Cesar Lima, Angel García and some not so young but still developing players as Nedzad Sinanovic, who’s been waiting his moment to reach the ACB team (and once he’s reached there, he’ll probably stay)

They played this situation quite often. Beginning with a hand off, they set an off ball screen near the free throw line and from that point, they read the defense.

To play a 1 on 1 using the space “3” leaves when cutting:

To look for the shooting guard’s “come back” if he can’t receive a lob pass to finish with an easy lay up in case the defender gets stucked on the screen. “2” can catch and shot or he can play the pick and roll:

And they can also make it a little bit longer, making the wings play it all the way until the end, with “3” getting the ball and playing the ball screen (maybe they didn’t find a pass earlier, or maybe they wanted to let the shotclock run)

Also, they had the inside pass in case the low post defender was relaxed (not very often as he is in ball side, mostly defending three quarters in front of “5”) Having Sinanovic there helped anyway, and created a focus to make it easier for the wings to play on help side.

Let's watch it:

D-Leage Final: Fear The Last Shot

After a long and intense season... I'll be around here more often (I hope so). In the next days - weeks I'll bring new stuff (I think it will be interesting)

To begin with, I've been following the NBA D-League this season, and I'm sure everybody knows it has just come to its end. A new Champ, Rio Grande Valley, after beating Tulsa. Coach Chris Finch, UK's National Team coach, has done a very good job and his team won the last game thanks to a Craig Winder's buzzer beater.

In the video we can watch a back pick followed by a hand off, which Tulsa's defenders try to stop by automatically switching. Finally Winder takes his shot and Rio Grande wins...

It's an interesting situation for last seconds. Let's watch it.