reconceptualizing the alley-oop

Video: Designed double alley-oop

By J.E. Skeets

Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt your regularly scheduled NBA programming to bring you this breaking YouTube clip that is of the utmost basketball importance. (Slight exaggeration.) Via With Leather, here's video of Ike Nwamu and Deuce Bello of Westchester Country Day School pulling off a designed double alley-oop in a recent high school game. It's ridiculous.

Believe it or not, that is exactly the type of basketball-meets-volleyball play we're going to start see popping up in NBA playbooks, practices and games. Why? Because for far too long, the alley-oop has been an underutilized offensive weapon. As Shoals so perfectly puts it: "If you accept the alley-oop as more like the pick-and-roll than the windmill, all sorts of perceptual doors begin to loosen. Remember McGrady's off-the-backboard self-oop? Why not use the backboard as a second floor, thus adding another (fourth?) dimension to the game. It sounds fancy and frivolous, but again, we're talking set plays ..." Hear, hear! Unleash the oop!