The second screen is the one that beats you

Defences survive the first pick and then collapse on the rescreen, because recovery leaves a guard standing on the wrong foot.

Watch a guard fight over a ball screen and get back to the hip. He looks like he has won. He has not. The screener has already turned, walked two steps back up the floor and set the same pick from a slightly steeper angle, and the guard who just spent all that energy chasing has to do it again from a standing start with his weight settled in the wrong place.

That is the rescreen, and I think it is the most reliably profitable thing in the half court that nobody argues about on television.

The reason is mechanical rather than clever. Fighting over a screen is not a run, it is a series of hard lateral pushes finished by a lunge back into the ball. When the guard completes that recovery he arrives with his chest square, his feet narrow and his momentum pointed at a spot the ball is about to leave. Every one of those is a bad starting position for the next lateral push. The offence does not need a new idea. It needs to run the same idea before the defender resets.

Big men have the same problem one layer behind. A centre who steps up to the level of the first screen has to retreat to the rim, and the retreat is slower than the step up because he is moving backwards and reading two players at once. Hit him with a second screen while he is still backpedalling and you have effectively taken his legs out of the possession without touching him.

Here is my complaint with the way this gets tracked. Most public data treats each screen as an independent event. Points per chance, frequency by coverage, all of it counted screen by screen. That misses the whole point, which is that the second one is cheap because the first one was expensive. Separate them and you will conclude the offence just ran a lot of pick and roll for average results, when what actually happened is that one action paid for the next.

Good defences know this and have an ugly answer. Switch the rescreen even if you refuse to switch the first one. It is a small surrender, it concedes a mismatch, and it is still cheaper than watching your guard trail a live dribble for six seconds.

Teams that will not switch anything have to jam the rescreen at the point of the catch instead. That works about half the time. The other half you get a foul on the big and a very tired guard.