University of North Carolina Athletics
Video Breakdown: Roy Williams On Secondary Break
October 23, 2013 | Men's Basketball
One of the best ways to learn more about the way Carolina coaches teach the game is attending the annual coaches clinic, which takes place this weekend in Chapel Hill.
But if you can't make it to the Smith Center, the next best option is to watch Roy Williams diagram some of his favorite plays. And not just any play, but one of Carolina's numerous options off the secondary break. During a recent clinic stop in Birmingham, Williams broke down one such set:
The play is a nice example of the philosophy Williams talks about often. If the primary break isn't there, some teams will pull the ball back out and set up a half-court offense. That's never been Williams' style. As he wrote in his autobiography, Hard Work, "We're going to run. We're going to try to make the other team's players run faster and longer than they have ever run in their lives. In a typical game we want to have between 90 and 105 possessions, and we try to get that number up as high as we can, because if I'm better than you are, the more possessions we play, the more likely it is that I'm going to beat you."
That philosophy is particularly beautiful when it's executed by players well-versed in the system who have the athletic ability to pull it off. Here's the same play Williams diagrammed above, put into action by Kendall Marshall and John Henson, with a screen from Harrison Barnes.
Williams, as he would be quick to tell you, didn't invent this particular play. Take a look at the first play in this sequence (but go back later and watch the whole sequence) from the 1995 Carolina-Duke game:
That's Rasheed Wallace on the slam, Jeff McInnis on the pass and Danta Calabria on the screen. Wow. Some of those Wallace highlights bring to mind the great Dean Smith quote when the legendary coach was asked about Wallace's frequent post-slam outbursts. "If I could dunk like Rasheed," Smith said, "I would scream, too."
