Passing Lanes

I coach a JV. Basketball team that is primarily freshman. I'm having trouble teaching passing lanes. Do you have, or know of any drills to teach passing lane concepts? To see, and read the defense so we don't force a bad pass? We need to be able to pass to the proper player in the passing lane.

I never found a specific drill for this..... maybe Jeff or Joe have one.... I will tell you what we did that worked for us.

When we worked on our zone offense we would talk about passing lanes and explain the thoughts behind that.

You ( the receiver ) are in a lane where there is NO defender between you and the ball. A lot of players think they are wide open because they are not being covered but, IF the passer cant see you, then you are NOT open. Moving a little to one side or the other is all that is needed at times.

Set up a zone D and have a player stand on one side with the ball...... then show the rest of your players what you are talking about, make sure that you rotate the players so they all can see what you are talking about.

From there, you and you assitant need to be on each side of the floor and talk them through it when you start to run your offense.
This applies regardless of what defense you are playing against.

I hope this helps.

I assume you mean passing lanes in a half court offense and not in transition/fast break.

Personally I don't talk about "passing lanes". I do however show them common situations we see in the half court and show them better angles. For example, everyone has the point trying to feed the post directly. Well you show them how a pass to the wing or a dribble toward the baseline helps you get a better angle to pass to the post.

I do emphasize:
- pass to the open guy (make the easy pass).
- pass away from the defense

We also use tight curls and basket cuts, teaching our kids how to get between the defender and the ball. This makes the pass easy and teaching the angle almost irrelevant. So it just depends on your offense.

So I guess my only thought is to show situations in your half court scrimmage / offensive break downs. We also put turnovers at the top of our stat sheet and only look at a few things. They know that if they want to play, they have to take care of the ball. So common sense starts to take over. Young kids know turnovers are bad but they don't understand how bad they are. They just play.