Want to Play Great in Transition Offense? Gregg Marshall's Early Offense Can Help You
About the Early Offense
The Early Offense is a transition offense that could be played as a primary offense regardless of the situation. This offense will show you how to beat your opponent down the court with quick scoring options, great spacing, and timing. You can run this type of offense after a score or miss, steal, or rebound. In each situation, you will have a balanced court, great energy, and impressive organization.
Beginning of the Early Offense
The Early Offense starts under your basket, right after you reach the possession of the ball. When the ball gets to your possession, the first pass goes to the point guard, who should get open on the ball side, at the level of a free-throw line and the widest possible. Except for the rebounder (or player who takes the ball out after the score), other players should sprint the court in order to beat defenders and get an easy score. This is how you start every Early Offense (Quick).
Spacing and Set Up
After sprinting the court, if there was no chance for an easy shot, we would get into the setups that we call Quicks. No matter if we play Quick 1,2 or 10, our spacing is crucial and has to be perfect.
We can see in the picture under that Position 1 is our point guard with the ball, and he is bringing the ball on the left side of the court. His first option would be a pass to the rim runner, Position 5.
Positions 2 and 3 are outside guards and they are positioned in the both corners to stretch the defense and make space for the rim runner inside the key. In case that outside defenders decide to help inside the key, our guards in the corners must be good shooters to punish that.
And finally, Position 4 is another big man on the court, a trailer who will be the last player joining the offense.
If the rim runner cannot get the ball we will run our Quicks.
Quick 1 and Quick 2
Coach Gregg Marshall's Early Offense Quick 1 is a Pick & Roll game with a point guard and trailer.
After the screen, Position 4 cuts to the basket while Position 5 is popping out to clear the key. Position 1 dribbles to the nail and tries to look for advantages. In most cases, Position 4 creates an advantage, so Position 1 passes to Position 5 because of a better passing angle with Position 4.
Right after he catches the ball, Position 5 is looking for a High Low with a Position 4. As you can see in the picture above and under, we kept the balance on the floor with just one post player inside the key and shooters on the perimeter.
With the same idea to create an advantage for a post player inside the key, Gregg Marshall also runs Quick 2 Early Offense. In this case, Position 5/ our rim runner will not sprint all the way to the basket. He can easily see if he has any advantage while running down the court. If there is no advantage there is no need to get under the basket, so he will stop at the free-throw line. All other players will keep their positions like in Quick 1.
This will create a perfect situation for a double screen, in which will Position 5 roll to the basket, and Position 4 will pop out for a potential shot. Position 1 should have good screens to be able to dribble to the nail without hesitation. Therefore, the angles of the screens are extremely important, and Coach Gregg Marshall highly points out that in this video.
Who Might Use the Early Offense
The Early Offense is an offense for high schools, colleges, and professional teams. Every level can run this play, especially teams that are more prone to the game in transition. Coach Gregg Marshall had a lot of success in running this play with the Wichita State University Basketball Team. You can score a lot of easy and fast points by pushing the ball down the court and playing Quicks.
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