Big men learn to shoot threes long before they learn to screen

Screening angles are the most valuable untaught skill in basketball, and the summer gym is busy teaching something else.

Two hundred threes a day. That is what a modern development plan for a twenty year old centre often amounts to, on the theory that a big who can shoot has a job and a big who cannot does not. The theory is roughly right and the priority is still wrong, because the same player will set forty screens a game for the next decade and almost nobody has ever coached him how.

Screening is a technical skill with real detail in it. The angle of the body relative to the defender's likely path, which decides whether the guard turns the corner or gets funnelled. The timing of the arrival, a beat before the ball handler moves, not after. What the feet do on the slip when the coverage shows early. Whether the screener rescreens or opens up. Each of those is teachable, each of them changes the value of a possession, and almost all of them get learned by accident.

Watch a young big set a ball screen and you can usually see the absence. He arrives static, square to the sideline, at the spot he was told, and the defender goes over the top without breaking stride. Nothing about that was effort. It was information he was never given.

The counter is that shooting is scarce and screening is common, so the market pays for the scarce thing, and any agent will tell his client the same. True at contract time. Less true for whether he is on the floor in the fourth quarter, which is decided by whether the point guard trusts the screen.

I would spend a third of every big's summer on it, with a live defender and a real ball handler, and I would film it from the baseline rather than the sideline so the angle is visible. Boring footage. Nobody posts it.

The best screeners in the league are extremely good at something that appears in no box score and gets taught in almost no gym. That combination should tell you where the advantage is hiding.