I know beating the press is mostly about having a deep bench and good BH/PASS/SPD/ATH. However, I'm curious how much difference your offensive set makes, if any. If it's more than negligible, how would you rank the offensive sets for effectiveness against the press?

Probably for me I'd rank them:
1. Flex -- emphasizes outside shooting a little more, seems to respond more favorably to higher distribution #'s/ratios to preferred player than other sets. Since the press can't take specific account of a high scorer, it's always nice to tweak them vs. a press team if it looks like it'll do some good.
2. Triangle -- Nothing special here, it just seems better than...
3. Motion -- probably the hardest of the 3 "standard" sets to target a high-scoring player. The motion is designed in the game to spread the love around more it seems.
4. Fastbreak -- Runnign a high-speed, turnover prone set vs. a defense designed to create turnovers seems, in general, to be a bad idea in my book (although I know many, many FB/Press vs. FB/Press national championship games have taken place over the history of the game. Disclaimer: This is also the only offensive set that I personally have never employed in the game, so my representation is based on general thinking rather than game mechanics. I would defer to others' opinions readily.

There are a couple different ways for breaking the press:

1. Maximize you best players minutes<slowdow> works best with a team with a crappy bench, my high walkon zone teams do this.

2.Get them in foul trouble, out fatigue the fatiguers....If I have a FT based team I try this. I'll go uptempo if I can thing I can hang.

3. Load up on your best players distro...they can't "double" so take advantage of it. I usually pair this with #1. This works best with Triangle teams.

I'd say the Flex for sure. Because you cant really double team the great shooters that you have to have to run the press.

So the best offense in this scenario would be one that allows you to load up distro for a couple dominant scorers. There seems to be a difference of opinion about whether flex or triangle is better for that purpose. Perhaps flex is better if your dominant scorers are usually perimeter players, and triangle is better if your dominant scorers are sometimes post scorers and sometime perimeter scorers. Is that accurate?

Motion slowdown is, in my humble opinion, the optimum combination for slaying those high ATH/SPD press teams at D3.

A factor within motion offense is that it offers the best chances for getting opportunistic baskets, hence is why you never really want to load up on just 2 or 3 players, while fullcourt press (while creating more turnovers) is the worst for allowing opportunistic scores. So, while reducing the opponents chances for creating turnovers, the slowdown also increases your chances of offensive efficiency - of which, when set up properly, motion inherently offers the best chances for.

Sprinkle that in with things like your best players playing more minutes, the opponents higher chances of getting into foul trouble, etc., then you got a pretty good formula for exploiting the weaknesses of the fullcourt press.

So would FCP have a harder time stopping an elite perimeter scorer or an elite LP scorer? My guess is the elite PER scorer would be more effective in this situation...

Posted by mroylanc on 4/11/2016 12:07:00 PM (view original):
So would FCP have a harder time stopping an elite perimeter scorer or an elite LP scorer? My guess is the elite PER scorer would be more effective in this situation...

all things being equal...I would definitely have to agree with statement....well, as long as BH, and to some extent PS, are factored into what you consider an elite perimeter scorer.