The best screen defense happens before the screen

Top locking the ball handler is unfashionable, uncomfortable and the cleanest way to stop an action that has not started.

Deny the catch and there is nothing to cover. That sentence sounds too simple to be a strategy, and yet a large amount of ball screen defense is spent solving a problem the defense agreed to have in the first place.

Top locking is the unglamorous version of this. The guard puts his body between his man and the screener, faces the sideline, and refuses to let him come off the pick in the direction he wants. It costs something immediately. It gives up the backdoor, it needs a big who is willing to protect the space behind, and it looks terrible on the two occasions per game when it fails.

But look at what it removes. A ball handler who catches on the wing with his shoulders already turned toward the screen has three easy reads. A ball handler who has to reject to the baseline, or come and get the ball twelve feet further out, or give it up entirely and cut, has none of them. The action still gets run. It gets run late, from worse ground, with two fewer seconds to make it work.

The objection is that top locking is exhausting and that officials will call the contact. Both true. Which is why I do not think it should be a scheme so much as a weapon you take out for particular people, in particular quarters, usually against a team with one creator and four passengers.

There is also an honesty problem in how we evaluate this. Analytics tools count possessions where a screen was set. Possessions where a screen was avoided, because the guard could not get to it on the terms he wanted, land in the bucket labelled isolation or transition or nothing at all. The defense gets no credit for the shot it prevented from being organised.

Coaches know. It is why you hear an assistant screaming a name a full four seconds before anything happens, while the crowd is still watching the rebound at the other end.

The screen is the last event in the sequence. It is almost never the first place the possession went wrong.