Sideline inbounds is where defences get a free man

The player throwing the ball in is temporarily not an offensive player, and most teams do nothing about it.

Five against five is a convenient fiction. On a sideline throw in it is four against five for as long as the ball is out of bounds, and I do not think coaches respect that number nearly enough.

The inbounder is not a threat. He cannot dribble, cannot cut, cannot be helped off in any meaningful way, and his defender is therefore free to do almost anything else. Good defences turn that man into a roamer who takes away the first read entirely. Which means the offence is running a four man action against five defenders, with a five second clock, near a sideline that functions as an extra defender, and often after a timeout in which the other bench has watched exactly this play twice already.

The usual response is to make the inbounder good at something. Have him take the ball out and then immediately receive a handback, converting him from bystander to ball handler and restoring the count. That works, and it is the reason the best passer on the floor is so often the one holding the ball at the sideline, which annoys me every time because it is the least productive place to put your best decision maker.

The alternative I prefer is to make the free defender wrong. If a team is going to leave one man unattached, force him into a choice he cannot make. Two simultaneous actions on opposite sides, one of which he can affect and one of which he cannot. Most sideline sets are sequential. Screen, then cut, then read. Sequential actions are exactly what a free defender is built to eat, because he only has to be right once, and he gets to watch the sequence unfold before deciding.

Late in games this gets worse, because everyone knows who the ball is going to, and the free man is stationed in that player's path with no other job. At that point running an action for the star is close to charity.

Here is the harsher version of my point. The five second count is treated as an emergency. It should be treated as a budget. If your set does not create a shot in three seconds, the last two are being spent handing the defence extra time to solve a puzzle it has already seen.