The Court

What this section is for

The floor is where an argument either survives or falls apart. A possession has an order to it — who sets the screen, who reads it, which help defender is late, where the ball ends up — and most disagreements about basketball are really disagreements about that order. The pages here work through it: matchups, rule changes and the sequences that explain a result better than the final margin does.

Two kinds of page sit side by side. Some are ours, written now, taking one mechanism at a time and following it from the rulebook to what it does to a rotation. The rest come out of the magazine's own archive of youth and club basketball, where the same mechanisms show up with less space to hide: a defence that cannot switch, a coach who has nine players and needs eleven.

If you came for a specific team, a specific season or a specific name, the fastest route is the index, which lists every page on the site. If you came to read something, start at the top: newest first, and the long pieces are marked by their own standfirst rather than by length.