The best offensive advantage is often the earliest one.
This week we’re diving into a trigger that starts almost immediately after crossing half court, putting pressure on the defense before it can get fully organized. The action creates downhill attacks early in the possession, forcing help, creating reactions, and getting the dominoes to fall.
What You’ll Learn
- How Bilbao uses high slot spacing to turn a familiar pitch into step-up action into an early downhill attack.
- Why keeping the action in the middle third changes the defensive problem and makes it harder to get under, recover, or load the gaps.
- How the same structure creates counters against pressure, including backdoors, blind pig entries, give-and-go reads, rejects, and secondary screening layers {🔒}.
- Insights from The Practice Lab, where Drew Dunlop creates two drills to help train the decisions and pacing behind Bilbao’s action, from keep-or-pitch reads to playing downhill with pace and making quick rim decisions {🔒}.
Let’s dive in…
When looking at immediate half-court triggers, one of our favorite spacings is both high slots filled flowing into the action. It is a structure we explored in our High Point Read Option Pick & Roll breakdown {🔒}…
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…and now see Bilbao in Spain’s ACB using a similar, equally effective concept with their High Slot Pitch & Step Up.
By starting high and wide in the slots, Bilbao flows from a guard-to-guard pitch into a step up screen, creating an early downhill attack. Off this action, the ballhandler is able to play with pace, while the spacing and screening angle create built-in counters as the defense adjusts.
Familiar Action, Unfamiliar Location
A pitch into a step up ballscreen, often referred to as “Miami Action” in American basketball, is something most defenses are used to seeing. But even when the defense knows it is coming, the combination of the pitch, the timing, and the screening angle can still be difficult to contain.
Typically, Miami actions happen in the outer third of the floor. The dribble handoff comes toward the sideline, and the screener arrives to turn the ball back toward the middle.
This high slot variation changes the geography.
Instead of playing the action on the sideline, Bilbao keeps everything in the middle third of the floor, immediately challenging the defense’s rules and spacing principles.
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That is where the action becomes interesting. By starting high and wide in the slots, Bilbao gives the ballhandler room to shape the pitch, drive the exchange downhill, and force the defense to guard the handoff and the upcoming screen before it is fully organized.
The spacing also puts pressure on the defender guarding the receiver. If they trail too tightly, they can be pulled into the exchange and struggle to get back under the screen. If they try to jump the action, the middle of the floor can open quickly. And because the exchange happens above the level of the big, the screener is already in position to find the angle, turn the screen, and help create the downhill attack.
That is the larger lesson of the action: Bilbao is not reinventing the pitch into a ballscreen. They are changing the location, speeding up the timing, and forcing the defense to solve the problem earlier in the possession.
Why It Matters
The value of this trigger is not only in the first read. It is in the structure.
From the same high slot spacing, Bilbao can create:
- Early downhill attacks before the defense is set
- Tough decisions for defenders trying to chase, switch, or recover
- Pressure-release options if the defense denies the initial pitch
- Secondary actions layered on top of the same starting shape
That versatility is what makes the action worth studying. It gives the offense a clean entry point, but it does not become static after the first exchange. The same spacing can flow into counters, rejects, give-and-go reads, and secondary screening layers depending on how the defense reacts.
For coaches, the takeaway is less about copying the exact action and more about the principle behind it: start with a simple structure, create pace early, and make the defense guard multiple connected problems before it has solved the first one.
To complement this week’s breakdown, Drew Dunlop designed two Practice Lab drills around the same high slot spacing used in Bilbao’s action: “32 Earn It • High Slot 2-Man Game” and “4v3+1 Play It Down • High Slot Spacing” {🔒}.
The goal is to help guards get comfortable operating in the middle third of the floor, where decisions come quickly and the spacing can feel different than traditional sideline DHO or ballscreen actions. Within these drills, players are asked to read the exchange in real time:
- Keep it, pitch it, or screen
- Shape the angle of the pitch
- Play downhill with pace
- Make quick rim reads as the advantage forms
For coaches looking to bring aspects of the High Slot Pitch concept into their own environment, the Practice Lab focus this week is less about memorizing Bilbao’s exact action and more about training the spacing, timing, and decisions that make the action work.
🔐 SG+ Members can now watch the full High Slot Pitch & Step Up breakdown on SGTV, then head to The Practice Lab to see how these ideas can be built into live, decision-rich drill design.
