It's simple, really

Sporting News, The, April 17, 1995 by Kevin Simpson

While mulling the short list of tactical possibilities for a basketball tearn of 6-year-old girls he coaches, journeyman NBA center-turned-sportscaster Scott Hastings found his thoughts drifting back to Chuck Daly. This had absolutely nothing to do with the wicked sense of humor that earned Hastings a gig on the Letterman show.

It's just that, philosophically, the play that won two championships for Daly's nasty boys in Detroit also seemed a perfect fit for Hastings' angels in pigtails. Anybody can run the pick-and-roll. The Pistons just did it a little meaner, and a lot better, than most. It was a lesson worth handing down.

"We didn't so much run the pick-and-roll in games," says Hastings, who played for Daly on the Pistons' championship tearn of 1990, "but in practice we'd do stuff like tell one girl to just stand there and tell another girl to dribble as close to her as possible."

Now, simply point the girl without the ball in the direction of the basket and you've got the rudiments of basketball perfection. It works for boys and girls on the playground, it works for middle-aged accountants down at the health club and it works -- oh boy, does it work -- for NBA players at the pinnacle of their profession.

"The pick-and-roll is a science," says Daly. "It's a total offensive concept in itself. In Detroit, we became a proponent of it as much or more as anybody in the league. And it was very good to us."

Hastings suspects he first learned the play when his father coached him in third grade. He was still running it at the University of Arkansas when Eddie Sutton counseled him that the older a coach grew, the simpler the game got. And, of course, Hastings watched his Pistons tearnmates redefine the concept under Daly. Now Hastings hands it down to first-graders.

The play's tactical roots fie in a time when basketball strategy was more intuitive than contrived and frustrated post players started stepping out to set picks on defenders who sagged onto their turf. But the more strategists you engage, the more ancient basketball volumes you peruse, the more appealing becomes the idea that the pick-and-roll is practically etched on a player's genetic blueprint, dormant on a DNA double-helix that looks strangely like a coach's chalkboard diagram.

It is that instinctive. It is that ingrained. It is that reliable.

"Detroit brought it back in fashion," says Lakers assistant coach Bill Bertka, whose meticulous scouting and preparation are NBA legend. "It's funny, the different things that were employed years ago and all of the sudden somebody brings it back. Of course, when you employ it with today's athletic talent, it becomes a hell of a lot more interesting."

That's why Daly led the NBA's revival of the pick-and-roll in the early '80s, when he started coaching a Pistons tearn whose front line of Bill Laimbeer, Kent Benson and Kelly Tripucka was not exactly known for its offensive creativity in the low post. But in the hands of an artist fike Isiah Thomas, later joined by Vinnie Johnson and Joe Dumars, the pick-and-roll proved a brushstroke of strategic genius. Laimbeer's preference for spotting up for the jumper, rather than rolling to the basket, combined with his size and nasty disposition to make him the perfect combination of formidable obstacle and offensive force.

"Not only was he 6-11 and 280," says Hastings, "but if you put a hand out to feel for where he was, he was grabbing it."

Detroit did the pick-and-roll to death -- maybe even overdid it, Daly says. But he'd been entitled by the pick-and-roll since he coached high school ball in Punxsutawney, Pa., where even Phil the groundhog has been known to emerge from hibernation long enough to screen for a passing dribbler. (Little-known meteorological footnote: If Phil flares out for the jumper, spring is on its way. If he rolls back to the hole, prepare for six more weeks of winter.

"It's always been around," Daly says. "It was a mainstay years and years ago, but then it got lost a little bit We found it a very effective weapon with the personnel we had, particularly Thomas and Laimbeer."

During his brief stop in New Jersey, Daly employed the traditional big guy-little guy pairing of point guard Kenny Anderson and power forward Derrick Coleman, but he also found an effective guard-guard Combination in Anderson and Drazen Petrovic. That sort of tactical diversity is now mirrored all over the league..

So is a preoccupation with the simple geometry of the pick-and-roll, an attention to angles that offers stiff more variables on a basic theme. But nothing has moved the play into the modem age like the raw physical skills of the players who run it.

John Bach, the esteemed and encyclopedic assistant coach of the Hornets, remembers his 1942 high school coach in New York demanding an actual note of apology and explanation if a dribbler were allowed to split his team's two defenders on a pick-and-roll. It was that unthinkable. Now, thanks to the Cavaliers' Mark Price and others who constantly elevate the standard of ballhandling, Hallmark ought to print a card for the occasion.