Description
5-Out Offensive Concepts
What 5-out teams like Alabama, Creighton, and Nebraska are running offensively?
The benefits of 5-out offensive positioning are relatively easy to comprehend. When the paint is open, a ball handler has more room to drive — or an off-ball player has more room to cut.
Modern defenses have begun to prioritize taking away the three-point line, which has even further intensified the benefits an offense receives from perimeter spacing.
Naturally, the desire to maintain 5-out spacing leads to simpler offensive action. Without movement inside the arc, player interactions are often station-to-station — a quick pin down or a dribble handoff between the players next to each other.
This 140 pages playbook covers:
Zoom Action: The most common example is “Zoom” action — with a player receiving a pin down from one teammate, immediately into a dribble handoff from another teammate.
Hand-backs: This is when you are receiving a pass to then flip/handoff the ball back to the original passer — are another example of an action used to simultaneously incorporate three perimeter players.
Pin Downs and Staggers: Performing stagger screen with a wide-open paint (to curl the basket) has been the bread and butter of Bob McKillop’s motion offense for years at Davidson.
Flex Action: Bruce Pearl and Auburn are one of the best examples of a team using old actions with new spacing.
With more high-major coaches embracing a 5-out style of play, it will be interesting to see how the actions and concepts evolve — particularly in an environment (contrasting the NBA) that tends to lack superstar wings capable of creating efficient offense on their own.
