Judge a pick and roll two passes after the screen

Most of the value in a ball screen is collected by somebody who never touched it during the action itself.

A ball screen that ends in a shot has usually failed. That sounds like a provocation and it is not meant as one. The action exists to move four defenders, not two, and the possessions where it works best tend to end with a pass, then another pass, then a shot taken by a player standing somewhere nobody was looking.

Public tracking does not really see this. The convention is to attribute the possession to the action that started it and then measure what came of the ball handler's decision. Scored on the drive. Passed to the roller. Kicked to the corner. Everything after the first pass gets filed as something else, and by the time the ball has swung twice the play is recorded as a spot up jumper with no parent.

So the number you read about pick and roll efficiency is, in effect, a number about early terminations. It is heavily weighted towards the possessions that stopped soonest, which are exactly the ones where the defence was least disturbed.

I would fix this by attaching a clock. Anything scored within four seconds of the screen belongs to that screen, whoever shot it and however many passes intervened. Crude, easy to argue with, still better than what we do now. Under that rule, the teams that look like inefficient pick and roll offences because their guards pass early would come out much closer to the top, and a few high usage isolation heavy attacks would slide.

There is a real objection here. Credit at two passes removed is not obviously credit for the screen. Maybe the shot was created by a defender losing his man, or by a good relocation, or by pure luck in a scramble. All fair. But the alternative is worse, because right now we assign zero, and zero is definitely wrong.

Coaches already behave as though the four second rule exists. Listen to what gets shouted from a bench after a guard turns down a contested floater and swings it. The praise is for the pass. Nobody on the sideline believes the possession ended at the screen.

The people counting have not caught up with the people coaching, and until they do, every argument about which offence uses the pick and roll best is being conducted with the wrong numbers in hand.