Play of the Day: Wyoming Flare to Screen Behind
Wyoming sophomore guard Jeremy Lieberman is averaging 4.0 PPG and was one of the very talented players I coached this summer as part of the European Maccabi Games.
One habit that I picked up during my time working under Adam Turner at Bard, was trying to watch as many late game situations as possible. Whenever we had a few spare moments in the office we would pull up the last five minutes of a close game from the night before and study what each team did down the stretch. How did the winning team execute? What mistakes did the losing team make? How could we learn from these examples?
When I was looking through last night’s close games, I was immediately drawn to Wyoming’s 81-78 win over San Jose State. This past summer I had the chance to coach Jeremy Lieberman, a guard for the Cowboys, when he played in the Maccabi European Championships. There’s no doubt about how talented Jeremy is and how dominant he was at times during our summer tournament, so it’s always fun watching him play significant minutes as a sophomore for Wyoming.
He has been having a successful season so far, playing in all 30 of Wyoming’s games and starting 21 of them. He is averaging 4.0 PPG in about 20 minutes per game, facilitating an offense that is led by senior Josh Adams’ 24.9 PPG. Jeremy is shooting 37.5% from deep, which is his specialty.
As I was watching the game I picked out a favorite play that Wyoming ran down the stretch. They were trailing 66-63 with under 8 minutes to play. It was a classic “Need 3” situation and Coach Larry Shyatt called a great play.
Wyoming flares a guard to the wing in order to get him an open catch and driving advantage. He automatically rips baseline, drawing help defender slides. While that happens Wyoming’s 5-man sets a screen behind the play for a shooter. The shot ended up not falling, but it was a very clean look for Jason McManamen, a 45% 3-point shooter and the Cowboys’ second leading scorer.
This is a great action for coaches to have in their pocket in case they are in a dire “need 3” situation late game. These screen behind actions are getting very popular and Bates College actually dialed one up against us in our matchup this season and while the shot didn’t fall, they got a very good look out of it. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD PLAY DIAGRAM PDF
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