Basic Basketball Passing

Basic skills of passing are just like the basics of shooting, dribbling, and defense. B-ball players must maintain balance, have vision, have touch, and awareness. Just like each of the traits mentioned before…they take practice to develop.The basics:Positioning and Vision: You will pass out of a variety of scenarios depending on your position and circumstances you are confronted with; inbounds pass, back to the basket in a post-up, facing the hoop in triple threat, while on the dribble, and many more. Throwing a post-entry pass from the wing is much different than a full-court baseball pass on a buzzer beater inbounds, but a couple things are always constant: You should try to always stay balanced and always have your head up surveying the floor. Secure the ball: Learning to use pass fakes and learning to use your body to shield passes. If you don’t learn how to do these things, you will turn the ball over and will be sitting at the end of the bench. Always keep your body between a defender and the ball when making a pass, step around the defense to make a pass, or use a pass fake in the opposite direction of where you actually intend to pass to get the defense out of your way.The easy pass: 99% of the passes you make in your career aren’t going to make any highlight reels. In fact, it is often the pass THAT LEADS to a pass that results in an easy basket. A strong passer can see that if they pass to the guy at the top of the key, he will be able to feed it into the post at a better angle (but if you, yourself, passed it directly to the post…the D might pick it off). Here is an easy rule of thumb…if you aren’t sure if the ball can fit through a gap, or you aren’t sure if they can catch the ball, DO NOT THROW IT.Note – we call these passes where you aren’t sure about the result “50-50 passes”.Throw short passes: Long passes are more easily defended. The longer the ball is in the air, the more time the defense has to react and make a play on it. Try to minimize the amount of long cross-court passes thrown, and be careful on long skip passes. If you need to, there is nothing wrong with taking one or two dribbles toward your teammate before passing. Check out The World of Hoops for great basketball training: videos, guides, videos, and drills.