Read Ball Screens Like James Harden
– Think The Game Thursday –

One of the best ball screen readers is James Harden – he sees the entire floor and uses his ability to pass and score to play at an MVP level. If you want to be a better playmaker, you have to excel at utilizing ball screens.

Think Deeper

Basketball Passing Skill: Bent Elbow Pass

The first time I played in a professional basketball game in Greece I was shocked by the speed. I was not shocked by the speed of the players running up and down the court or by the quickness of the guards, but I was shocked by the speed of the ball.

Nothing in my basketball training had prepared me to for the speed of the ball movement. The passes were moving so fast, the ball was being delivered to players who were open quickly. It took me the whole game to begin to adjust mentally and it took weeks of honing my passing skills to be able to keep up.

The biggest difference between youth basketball, high school, college and professional basketball is the speed of the passing. Of course the players are faster and more physical, but their years of basketball training create a level of ball movement that is beautiful to watch and daunting to attempt for an untrained passer.  Therefore I want to share a key passing drill that if done every day will prepare you to deliver passes accurately, with speed, and against a tough defender.

But first you need to know the old-fashioned chest pass doesn’t work at high levels of play.  The chest pass is useless when you are closely guarded.  When you have a pesky defender playing you tight, there is no way to deliver a chest pass to a teammate that is open for a split second.  Why not? The chest pass has has to be thrown from a single delivery point–the chest–and therefore a good defender can take away passing angles from that delivery point, especially angles to dangerous ares on the court–like the rim or the middle of the court.

Instead of the chest pass I want to introduce you to the pass that allowed me to become a real playmaker.  The pass is a favorite of Steve Nash and Chris Paul.  It will make post-entry passes so much easier; it will make wing-entries a piece of cake; and it will allow you to deliver passes to cutters with deadly timing.  The pass is called the Bent-Elbow Pass.  We teach it at PGC Basketball in honor of Dick DeVenzio, PGC’s founder, who created and named this pass.

The ball is held not in front of the chest, and not over your head and not in triple-threat.  The ball is held just in front of your shoulder, with your hand behind the ball, and your elbow directly under the ball and tight to your body, bent and ready to drive the ball with a piston-like motion like the piston in a car engine.

The beauty of this pass is that, if you keep your elbow bent, you can deliver the ball with power from several delivery points: You can snap the ball high over the defenders head, punch it shoulder height past the defender’s ear, crack the ball low in a bounce pass by the defender’s hip pocket or wrap it wide around their outstretched hand.  There is no way a defender can close down all these angles at once, and so a bent-elbow pass is one that is a “must have” and a pass that needs to be trained by any player that is serious about delivering the ball with accuracy and power.  This pass must be practiced with both hands and all from angles in order to gain violent speed and pin-point accuracy.

Bent-Elbow Passing Drill: This drill should be done while standing in a low-wide stance, twisting the core with each pass and using an explosive out-breath to generate power.  Stand about ten feet from a wall, and aim at a target no larger than a dime at about shoulder height on the wall.

You’ll do the following passes ten times with each hand:

1. High Hook-Passes over imaginary defender’s head.
2. Ear Punch-Passes strait from shoulder by defender’s ear.
3. Pocket-Pass down by defender’s hip pocket.
4. Reach-Around snap the arm straight out wide around a defender’s outstretched hand.
5. Eye-fake passes where you create an opening by looking at one passing window and then pass through another.

This basketball passing skill is one that will pay off with more assists and less turnovers in REAL GAMES. Train it, own it and change your game.