"Cutters" motion offense

Anyone have experience with this?
http://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/offense/cutters.html

I'm trying to teach this to my 5th grade travel team and could use a sounding board. I posted some comments in the discussion at the end of that article, and have some more questions and thoughts after we ran through it during our practice tonight.

I run that a lot. However, the bigest problem is that as the offense as laid out ther are no specified scoring opportunities. It becomes, pass, cut, pass, cut, pass. cut, turnover. So I make sure I specify the scoring opportunities. First option, hit the cutter for the layup. Second option, look to drive. If not there, pass and cut. I also incorporate a pick and roll between the corner player and wing player. One thing I advise at this age level is to make sure your players understand that offense is about scoring -- so they need to take the open opportunities. Good luck.

Thanks. I did make it clear that they have the option to drive to the basket. Trying to score isn't a problem for me - I have 10 players who all want to get as many buckets as possible. Part of my goal of this offense is to keep everyone from crowding the paint at once, looking for a pass, and to keep everyone from dribbling around looking for an opportunity to drive to the basket.

I also thought of adding the pick to the corner player too. I plan on adding that once they get comfortable with the simpler offense.

So what do you do if someone drives to the basket or passes to a cutter, and the shot isn't there? We struggled with resetting the offense when this occured. And do you have any ways of adding more motion to this? Seems like there's a lot of standing around if you don't have the ball and aren't the cutter.

We ran something similar... but it was an open post offense... the rule was simple... when someone drove to the basket from the wing.... the opposite wing had to go back door and look for a pass/lay up.

Is that clear enough?

dpt wrote:So what do you do if someone drives to the basket or passes to a cutter, and the shot isn't there? We struggled with resetting the offense when this occured. And do you have any ways of adding more motion to this? Seems like there's a lot of standing around if you don't have the ball and aren't the cutter.

I teach them to look to the weak side, either at the block, short corner, or wing, and dish off.