The pick and roll is a two-player action in which a screener sets a pick for the ball handler and then rolls toward the basket to receive a pass.
The pick and roll is the most run play in modern basketball, a two player machine with a decision tree. The screener plants a legal screen, the pick, on the ball handler's defender; the ball handler uses it to turn the corner; and the screener rolls to the basket, forcing the defence to choose between stopping the drive, the roll, or the shooters the action leaves open.
Every defence answers differently, dropping the big man back, switching everything, trapping the handler, and entire coaching careers are built on those answers. The play's history is the sport's tactical history: perfected as a scoring duet by Utah's Stockton and his frontcourt partner in the 1990s, industrialized by Steve Nash's Phoenix teams, and now run in some form on a majority of NBA possessions.
Variations fill the vocabulary: the pick and pop, where the screener fades for a jumper, the Spain pick and roll with a third screener, and the re-screen when the first angle fails. Quiz questions about famous offences are usually pick and roll questions in disguise, because for forty years the surest way to create an advantage has been to make two defenders guard three outcomes at once.
In use"They ran the pick and roll until the defence finally switched, then attacked the mismatch."