Ram Red

Start in a box formation with your best shooter on the weak-side elbow, and have your best pick-and-roll ball handler inbound the ball. The post player you want to eventually screen the pick should start on the ball-side low block.

One big slides up to the high post and the other joins him there, forming a double screen. The shooter curls tightly off both of them, looking for a catch-and-shoot on the wing — and if his defender helps too far off the roll man, that roll man ducks straight to the rim for a layup instead.

At the same time, the third perimeter player takes a couple of steps toward the rim and pops back out calling for the ball — a small movement whose only job is to keep his own defender occupied and out of the paint.

If nothing is open right away, the inbounder simply passes to the shooter and the whole shape resets: both bigs set a staggered down screen — spaced apart on purpose, not stacked together — for the point guard, who pops out to the top of the key to reset the offense.

This is where Ram Red earns its name. Once the point guard has the ball back at the top, one big screens the other big's defender, freeing that second big to sprint up and set the real ball screen for the point guard. Because that screener's own defender just got hung up, there's no one left to hedge or trap the pick-and-roll.

With ideal spacing on both wings, the point guard attacks the rim off a completely clean screen, reading the help defense to either finish or find an open shooter.

The whole point of screening the screener is to remove any possibility of the defense hedging or trapping the final pick-and-roll — that's worth extra practice reps on its own.

The point guard should try to catch the reset pass in the ball-side slot rather than dead center, since that gives noticeably more room to operate off the final screen.

Every screen in this play must be set and held — a lazy screen anywhere in the chain lets a defender fight through and recover in time to help.