The Coverage Menu and What Each Concedes
Dropping the screener's defender back toward the basket protects the rim and keeps both defenders in the play, at the cost of conceding the pull-up jumper from behind the screen. It is the safest coverage against a driver and the most generous against a shooter.
Switching assignments keeps a body attached to each threat and eliminates the momentary gap entirely, but it creates two mismatches at once: a smaller defender on a bigger player near the basket, and a bigger defender on a quicker player in open space. Blitzing, sending both defenders hard at the ball, takes the ball out of the best player's hands and concedes a numerical advantage behind the trap, since three defenders now cover four attackers. Icing, in which the on-ball defender angles his body to force the handler away from the middle and toward the sideline, uses the boundary as an extra defender and concedes the pocket pass to the screener rolling into the space that was vacated to set the trap up. None of these is correct. Each is a decision about which shot the defence prefers to allow.
