Pre-switching is how defences stopped paying for shooting gravity

Trading assignments before a screen arrives removes most of the chaos an elite off-ball shooter used to create.

Gravity was never magic. It was a rotation problem, and defences have largely solved the rotation problem by refusing to rotate.

The old mechanism worked like this. An elite shooter runs off two screens on the weak side. His defender cannot be screened off, so a second defender steps up to delay, and now two defenders are attached to a man who does not have the ball. Somewhere on the other side of the floor a player is unguarded, and a good offence finds him. That was the tax a defence paid for respecting a shooter, and for a while it distorted entire schemes.

Pre-switching is the answer and it is almost boringly simple. Before the screen arrives, the two defenders involved trade assignments. No chase, no help, no delay, and critically no moment where a third defender has to leave anybody. The shooter comes off the screen into a defender who was already there. Nothing has been given up except the matchup, and if your roster is built from players of similar size, the matchup costs very little.

That last clause is the whole story of modern roster construction, incidentally. Teams do not collect interchangeable six-foot-six defenders because they are aesthetically pleasing. They collect them because interchangeability is what makes pre-switching free.

The offensive counters exist and they are worth watching for. Screen with your smallest player to force a size mismatch that the switch cannot absorb. Have the shooter reject the screen entirely and cut backdoor, which punishes a defender who has already begun the trade. Or slip the screen early, before the switch is communicated, which is why the timing of a slip has become such a prized skill.

Here is my slightly unpopular position. I think the pure off-ball shooter has been devalued by this more than anyone admits, and that the premium has moved to shooters who can also attack a closeout with one dribble. Standing still and being feared is not the job any more.

Watch a defence talk before a possession starts. The switches are being agreed out loud, ten feet from the ball, before anything happens. That conversation is what killed gravity.