Coaches and teams around the league spend hours trying to devise a great out-of-timeout play. The Indiana Pacers might have one of the best four-point plays. And they have used it successfully and unsuccessfully several times.
Mastering the Four-Point Play: The Pacers’ Secret Weapon
Social media exploded when Tyrese Haliburton hit a game-winner against Giannis Antetokounmpo to stun the Bucks. He got fouled on the play. But the Bucks should have seen it coming. The Indiana Pacers ran the exact same play against the Boston Celtics in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals. Against the Celtics, Aaron Nesmith missed an eventual game-tying shot. Throughout this season, they have run the play several times.
Let’s take a deeper look into Indiana Pacers’ four-point play against the Bucks. With the win, the Pacers are now tied for the fourth spot with Milwaukee. If these two end up in the 4/5 bracket, we are in for an amazing first-round series. They certainly have a lot of history.
Understanding Pacers’ Four-Point Play
The play that the Pacers run for Haliburton’s game-winner is a creative way to get a player open. When the Pacers ran it against the Celtics in last year’s playoffs, the Internet referred to it as the four-vertical set. Now let’s try and dissect the play.
The play starts with one player inbounding the ball on the sideline. The other four guys on the floor are lined up behind halfcourt. Three of the players have to run diagonally across the floor, which clears out space for the man who will get the ball and shoot. In this case, it was Tyrese who slipped under the screens, caught the ball, and drilled a three-pointer in the corner.
The play has a lot of similarities to actions on the football field. In football, two or three receivers are lined up on one side of the ball. The first set of WRs go one way to clear out the defense, leaving space for the other WR to slip underneath for an easy reception.
The Mastermind Behind the Play
Former player Jenny Boucek is the one who designed the play for the Indiana Pacers. She played college basketball for the University of Virginia, and then professionally for the Cleveland Rockers in the WNBA. She also played professionally in Iceland, where she won the national championship and the national cup.
Boucek joined Rick Carlisle’s staff on the Pacers in 2021. She is one of the top assistants on the team, tasked with helping players with their shooting mechanics. Jenny studies the athlete, and his natural movement, then tries to mix that with the science of shooting. While her basketball career was cut short due to a back injury, it looks like her coaching career will go a long way.
Flag Football Plays Work In Basketball
In a podcast in the summer, Jenny talked about the origin of the play. This might surprise you, but the origin comes from her experience playing flag football. In the podcast, she explained,
“We had a playbook and you know, you had three on the line of scrimmage and the quarterback they were all eligible receivers. We had a playbook with all these routes to try to get people open and it was a blast. Sue Bird and I were always shooting the breeze about basketball, she is very creative, and one day, we were just chatting. We started talking about some of those routes that we used to run and could it be translatable to a basketball situation. That’s kind of the genesis of this play, from flag football.”
Later in the video, she explains the idea of using the momentum of the whole court. While most out-of-timeouts plays for a three-pointer use only the half-court, this play uses the full-court to create momentum and get an open shot.
Photo credit: © Trevor Ruszkowski-Imagn Images
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