How to draw up a basketball play

A play diagram is a message, not a drawing. Its whole job is to get five people to the right spots in the right order, and it is working only if a player can look at it for four seconds and know where to go. Everything below is in service of that.

The notation coaches already read

This is the standard set. Do not get creative with it. Players learn it once at twelve and use it for the rest of their careers, and a diagram in a private dialect costs you the four seconds you were trying to save.

What happened	How it is drawn
Cut	Solid line, arrowhead at the end
Pass	Dashed line, arrowhead at the receiver
Dribble	Wavy or zigzag line, arrowhead at the end
Screen	Solid line ending in a T-bar, the crossbar across the screening angle
Handoff	Solid line with two short ticks across it
Shot	Short dashes to the rim
Offensive players	Numbers 1 to 5
Defenders	X, usually X1 to X5 to show the matchup

Two conventions are worth deciding on as a staff and then never changing. The first is whether a screen’s T-bar sits where the screener’s feet are, which is what most coaches mean, or where the cutter turns. The second is whether the ball’s starting position is marked at all. Mark it. A diagram where nobody can tell who has the ball is a diagram nobody can run.

Phases, not frames

The most common way to ruin a play diagram is to try to show the whole thing at once. Five arrows crossing in the lane is not a play, it is a knot.

Break it instead into phases. A phase is everything that happens at the same time, and the next phase starts where the last one ended.

Most half-court sets are three phases:

1. The entry. How the ball gets where it needs to be, and who clears out to make room.
2. The action. The screen, the cut, the ball screen — the thing the play is actually about.
3. The finish. The shot, the pass to the shot, and the second option if the first one dies.

Here is the same set, second phase. The point guard has cleared to the corner, and the big who just screened him turns and screens the ball.

If you cannot say out loud what each phase is for in one sentence, the play has too many phases or too few.

A continuity is the exception. Draw one full cycle — for a flex or a shuffle that is usually four phases — and then write “runs again the other way” rather than drawing the same thing twice.

Name the spots, not the coordinates

Every good staff has a shared vocabulary for the floor, and it is the single cheapest thing you can teach. The usual names, front to back:

• Corner — outside the arc, near the baseline.
• Wing — outside the arc, roughly free-throw-line extended.
• Slot — outside the arc between the wing and the top, sometimes called the guard spot.
• Top — above the arc, on the middle of the floor.
• Elbow — the corner of the free-throw line and the lane line.
• Nail — the middle of the free-throw line, about 15 feet (4.6 m) from the backboard.
• Block — the first marked space on the lane line.
• Short corner — about halfway between the block and the corner, on the baseline.
• Dunker — just outside the lane along the baseline, a step off the block.
• High post — inside the free-throw circle, facing the rim.

Once a team has these words, a diagram stops being a drawing and becomes a checklist: 2 to the corner, 5 to the short corner, 4 to the nail. Players who can name the spot can find it without a diagram, which is the point.

One action per player per phase

This is the rule that does the most work. If 3 has to come off a screen and then cut backdoor, those are two phases, not one arrow with a bend in it. A player reading a diagram tracks one line at a time; two things on one line is where they stop reading.

The same applies to the ball. One pass per phase. If the ball gets reversed twice on one count, you are describing a shift, and a shift is its own phase.

Writing the coaching note

Every phase gets one line of text. Not three. That line is what you will say in the huddle, so write it the way you would say it.

The good ones answer a question the diagram cannot:

• Timing. “Both screens are set before he leaves.”
• The read. “Chased over the top, curl it. Topped, fade.”
• The cue. “Go on the second foot, not the catch.”
• What it is for. “This empties the strong side. The cut is not the shot.”

Avoid notes that repeat the arrows. “3 cuts to the corner” is already drawn; a player does not need it in words as well.

Draw one side, mirror the other

Pick a side of the floor and draw every play on it. Right side is the common convention, because most teams have more right-handed finishers, but the choice matters far less than the consistency.

Two reasons. The first is teaching: a player who has learned a set on one side learns the other side as “the same thing, flipped”, which takes a minute, rather than as a second play, which takes a week. The second is the playbook itself. When half your sets are drawn left and half right, nobody can compare two diagrams side by side, and the staff starts arguing about whether two plays are actually the same action with different names. They usually are.

Five things that make a diagram unreadable

1. Crossing lines. If two arrows cross, one of the two players is going the wrong way or the two things are not happening at the same time. Almost always it is a phase problem.
2. Arrows that start nowhere. A cut that begins six feet from the player it belongs to belongs to nobody. Start every line on the token.
3. Ten tokens. Defenders double the ink. Add them when the defense is the subject, and leave them out otherwise.
4. No ball. Mark who starts with it, and show every pass. A diagram where the ball teleports is a diagram that will be run wrong.
5. Bad spacing in the drawing itself. If two players are drawn four feet apart because that is what fit on the page, players will stand four feet apart. Keep roughly 12 to 15 feet (3.5 to 4.5 m) between perimeter players in the diagram, because the diagram is the instruction.

Draw it, then watch it

The last check is the one paper cannot do. A diagram is a still picture of something that only makes sense moving, and the mistakes that survive a drawing are timing mistakes: the screener who arrives after the cutter, the pass that is thrown before anybody is open, the two players who end up in the same spot on the same count.

SlongeHoops is built around this: you draw a play by saying what happens — one drag from a player is one action — and it works out the timing and animates the phases, so you find out in ten seconds whether the screen is actually set when the cutter gets there. You can also switch on a simulated defense, still in Beta, set how it guards the screen, and replay the same possession.

Whatever you draw it with, run it once at practice speed before you print it. A play that reads beautifully and cannot be run on time is still a bad play.