A double team is a defensive tactic in which two defenders converge on the ball handler, usually a dominant scorer, to force a pass or turnover.
The double team is defence by arithmetic: send two defenders at the one player who can beat you, and accept that someone else will be open. It arrives from chosen directions, baseline, top side, or off a selected weak shooter, and the offence's counter is drilled just as precisely: the trapped player passes out early, and the ball swings to the shooter the double team abandoned.
Great scorers are measured partly by how they handle it. The double team was the standard answer to dominant post players and to isolation stars alike, and under the NBA's old illegal defence rules teams had to commit to it honestly, with no half hearted hovering between two assignments allowed, a rule detail that shaped 1990s tactics.
The stat sheet rarely shows it directly, though its fingerprints are everywhere: the star's lower scoring line, the role player's career high, the assist that counts as beating the trap. Quiz questions about famous defensive game plans are usually double team questions, asking who a Finals defence decided to take the ball from, and which teammate's open shots punished the decision for the rest of the series.
In use"Every time the star caught it in the post, the double team arrived from the baseline side."