Post Entry: The Case Against the Chest Pass
Are you tired of watching entry passes get stolen or knocked away?
We seem to have a problem on our team with post entry passes. Honestly it took me several games to fully notice, but we were having entry passes knocked away or stolen on a regular basis. Even when we were “succssful” the ball was often touched by a defender, with our post falling forward or stepping out of position to get control.
Somewhere along the way I remember a college coach saying her rules for post entry passes were : Above the head or Below the Waist. Her point was that defensive players will most often have their hands active in the middle part of the post’s body, poking their hands in around the chest area. So the only logical passes are a bounce-pass to the low waist area or a high pass to the hand away from the defender.
This got me to wondering if these “rules” are more less absolute or whether others coach it differently.
Right away I stumbled onto a video from the IMG Academy. In the video the coach suggests a straight chest pass when the post is directly in front of the defender. I can certainly see this working, but I still think a bounce pass would be less likely to be tipped.
Watching Gonzaga coach Mark Few running drills it would seem like he prefers the bounce pass for post entries. In fact, most everything I found online suggested a bounce pass, but I found few strong opinions.
I did see an interesting article called What Happened to the Post Entry Pass. In it, Marc Gasol discusses some of the nuance:
“It’s not easy to make that pass,” Grizzlies center Marc Gasol said. “It’s something you’ve got to work on. Say you’re right handed. I’m right handed. If I’m on my right in the block, you’ve got to make that pass with your left. Most passers are trying to either make it with their right, or overhand over their head. If you’re doing that at the three-point line, guys are either going to back out or they’re going to presssure you. So it’s not an easy pass. … And meanwhile, the defense is going to try to front you or three-quarters you or push you off your block. It’s something you have to always work on…”
The PGC trainers didn’t hold back in condemning the chest pass more generally. They wrote: But first you need to know the old-fashioned chest pass doesn’t work at high levels of play. The chest pass is useless when you are closely guarded. When you have a pesky defender playing you tight, there is no way to deliver a chest pass to a teammate that is open for a split second. Why not? The chest pass has has to be thrown from a single delivery point–the chest–and therefore a good defender can take away passing angles from that delivery point, especially angles to dangerous ares on the court–like the rim or the middle of the court.
OneUp Basketball agrees and makes the case we focus way too much on “two-hand chest passing.” The author, Kevin Germany, notes that in 6 minutes of an NBA game he saw a total of 6 chest passes (out of 30 passes) and none was used as an assist.
A commenter suggested the “perfect pass” is the one received (and easily controlled) in the right place to help the receiver score. He added, only half-joking, “The only time the chest pass is the perfect pass is after the other team scores.”