Press Breaker: Point Guard Pivot

The Press Breaker is one of those “get out of jail free” cards every coach must have. When your team faces an effective and well-executed trapping situation in the full court often, the only remedy is to have a press breaker that is well drilled. Relying on your team’s individual ability to beat their man and force their way through the trap is often just wishful thinking. In game situations all too often the result of a trap is a turnover of the ball.

The Point Guard Pivot is a very interesting press breaker as it removes often the best ball handler from the initial inbound situation. The strength of the play is in the second pass within the offense often leads to the Point Guard handling the ball in broken play in the attacking third. This should result in a higher percentage of scoring opportunities and overall better execution around the offensive end of the floor.

The Point Guard is usually one of the better players within any team when making the right decision with regards to scoring options. This is because they handle the ball more often and have to be involved more intimately with the team’s offenses as they have so much control over the play calling.

When running any press breaker one of the most important aspects to have is poise. Displaying this attribute solves many issues commonly associated to dealing with a trap. All too often teams lack the ability to wait for the right opportunity to unfold and try to force passes and hastily make decisions. If a team understands and has ample opportunities from practice then all each player needs to do is meet the demands of their role within the play. There is no need for any player to do more than is required, conducting a press breaker is an exercise in control and measurement.

The other aspect that many teams struggle with when utilising a press breaker is changing from the emotion of survival to attack in the frontcourt. Many teams execute their press breaker very well in the backcourt but then do not generate any attacking offense. As a point of note if your team is not comfortable or does not have faith in the play, they will be slower in their transition from conservative to aggressive style of play from their press breaker.

Players need to be made aware that the best offense against a press breaker is one that finishes with a scoring opportunity. If this happens once or twice within the initial implementation of a press then the defence will have no option but to change tactics. When coaching pushing players in this scenario is very important as often in practice, the ability to score from a press breaker is all too often ignored.