DONOVAN MITCHELL WAS stuck.
Midway through the fourth quarter of a home game against the Sacramento Kings on Feb. 5, 2024, Mitchell’s Cleveland Cavaliers were leading by double figures. But the six-time All-Star found himself in a tough spot after running a pick-and-roll with big man Jarrett Allen. Mitchell knifed to the top of the key with defender Kevin Huerter trailing and picked up his dribble, seeing an open passing lane to get the ball to Allen. But Domantas Sabonis blocked it with his hand, leaving Mitchell hanging on his pivot foot with the ball at the free throw line.
Huerter caught up and started pestering Mitchell, who tried multiple fakes and pivot twists in vain. The shot clock was running down. With Huerter overplaying his right hand and Sabonis crowding Allen to deny an easy pass inside, Mitchell — running out of time and options — unleashed one final trick: He tossed the ball off the backboard to himself, leaping to slam home a self-assisted dunk.
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Donovan Mitchell uses backboard as a teammate in jaw-dropping slam
Donovan Mitchell goes off script, tossing the ball off the glass and hammering it home himself.
“There’s really no plan,” Mitchell told ESPN last month. “You’re caught, you have nowhere to go. You’re just trying to figure it out.”
That’s what Ja Morant did when he found himself airborne during the Memphis Grizzlies‘ recent play-in game against the Golden State Warriors. After going up and not having a good look at the rim, he improvised and threw the ball to himself off the glass — then caught it on the other side of the rim for a layup, almost like an in-game version of the Mikan drill.
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Ja passes to himself off the glass and lays it in
Ja Morant tosses it off the backboard to himself and gets the shot to fall for the Grizzlies vs. the Warriors.
The “self alley-oop” was once a rare experience, one most fans and players alike trace to a handful of early 2000s legends who, in desperation, used it both to get out of trouble and to create memorable highlights. But in the years since, the play has evolved beyond its flashy highlight roots and has increasingly been used strategically by some of the game’s most athletic and creative stars. And its true origins, also tactical in nature, actually go back almost as far as the NBA itself.
HALL OF FAMER Tracy McGrady’s emphatic self alley-oop during the 2002 All-Star Game was the first exposure to this highlight-reel play for many NBA fans. McGrady took advantage of the All-Star Game’s freewheeling style to toss the ball off the glass from beyond the free throw line and took off from the inner free throw circle for an uncontested slam.
Several of McGrady’s high-flying contemporaries, including Vince Carter and Kobe Bryant, also famously used the move. But so, too, did someone else — a little lower to the ground.
As a rookie in 1997, Tim Duncan — who earned the nickname “The Big Fundamental” due to his consistently unflashy play — found himself tightly guarded by Houston Rockets big man Kevin Willis and tossed the ball high off the glass to create room to catch it and throw down a basic two-handed slam, with predictably little theatrics. This wasn’t Duncan showing off; he simply got caught in a weird spot, saw the backboard as a bailout option and went for it. Michael Jordan also used the move as a tactical improvisation with the Bulls in the mid-90s (for a layup, not a dunk).
The polar opposite, in both airtime and hubris, was the case when Shaquille O’Neal pulled it off during the 1996 Olympics. O’Neal’s self-oop was a brag in highlight form, a 300-pound wrecking ball clowning the opponent on an open fast break.
But the true origins of the play — the backboard’s use as a passing tool — date to a seminal moment in the NBA’s infancy.
With only seconds left in double overtime of Game 7 of the 1957 NBA Finals, the St. Louis Hawks trailed Bill Russell‘s Boston Celtics by two points. Hawks player-coach Alex Hannum, who hadn’t stepped on the court in nearly a month (per author Terry Pluto in his book “Tall Tales”), called a timeout and drew up an audacious play: Hannum would inbound from under his own basket (timeouts didn’t advance the ball then), and toss it the full length of the court off the backboard. Hawks star Bob Pettit was to position himself at the free throw line, then catch the carom and lay the ball in to tie the score.
It nearly worked.
Hannum actually hit the backboard from 94 feet, an impressive accomplishment in itself. The ball also grazed the rim, with Pettit positioned well enough to even catch it midair to put it back in, but the putback rolled off the rim.
“I should have made the shot,” Pettit said later, as quoted in Pluto’s book. “Alex’s pass was perfect.”
Video footage exists, though it catches only the moments after Pettit’s miss as the Celtics begin celebrating their title — the first of what would be 11 championship rings in Russell’s memorable career.
Though not a self alley-oop, the moment clearly set the table for tactical uses of the backboard beyond making a shot. Sixty-five years later, the Ohio Bobcats used the same play to force overtime in a 2022 game against the Michigan Wolverines. And today, some of the game’s most visible stars are finding creative and strategic ways to use the backboard for more than just generating highlights.
CELTICS STAR AND 2024 Finals MVP Jaylen Brown‘s self alley-oop for a layup earlier this season was Duncan-esque in its practicality. Brown saw daylight between where he was and the hoop, and he decided in midair to abort the shot altogether and turn it into a self-pass. Whether it was pure improvisation or muscle memory — since he has tried this play before — his coach wasn’t surprised.
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Jaylen Brown turns flashy with off-the-glass alley-oop
Jaylen Brown throws it off the backboard, controls it midair, and lays it in with finesse.
“It’s just a good play,” Joe Mazzulla said. “That’s a play that’s been made by great players. It’s legal.”
Multiple people in the NBA’s officiating department confirmed the play’s legality, even if the play isn’t explicitly addressed in the rulebook.
“The rulebook is pretty clear: You can’t go get your own pass that hasn’t hit the backboard or the rim,” said Monty McCutchen, NBA senior vice president of referee development and training. “Once it hits the backboard or the rim, that’s pretty clear [that anyone can touch it].”
The play’s rise in use as a strategic approach has also dovetailed with increased player understanding of pivot foot rules and a subsequent uptick in “step-through” moves seen around the league. While it often looks like a traveling violation to many casual observers (and even some trained eyes), NBA rules allow players to jump off their pivot foot and even land with their nonpivot foot once their dribble is picked up, as long as their pivot foot doesn’t hit the floor again before the ball is passed or shot.
More and more players have discovered in recent years just how much space this allows them to cover, even after picking up their dribble. The self-oop is one of a few plays that has ticked up in frequency as a result.
Because of the coordination and timing needed to execute it, the self alley-oop might never be common, but some of the league’s best athletes have recognized its value beyond the highlight reel. Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo has done it multiple times in his career, both from the post and on a fast break. LA Clippers guard Ben Simmons used the move several times earlier in his career, in the NBA and at LSU. Morant, Joel Embiid, Anthony Edwards, Jrue Holiday, Russell Westbrook, Jamal Murray and Tyrese Haliburton have all used it in nonexhibition games — almost always as a tactic, not a stunt. Even Denver’s Nikola Jokic did it for a layup in the 2021 playoffs, proof that the play owes just as much to smarts and savvy as it does to hops.
“It can be a weapon,” Mitchell said. “Bron’s done it in the playoffs.”
Not just the playoffs, in fact — also in the Finals. LeBron James, unsurprisingly, has been among the game’s most frequent self-oopers during his career. From All-Star Games to regular-season action to the league’s biggest games, James has never been shy about using the backboard to serve the ball to himself.
It’s Bryant, though, who probably serves as the modern pioneer of using the backboard as a self-assist mechanism. Known for his incredible footwork, Bryant appears to be the first to have realized the potential of the space created by the step-through move off a pivot foot and the backboard’s occasional role in facilitating its use. The Los Angeles Lakers legend had an entire reel of self-oops in his career, to the point where it was obvious he worked on this play regularly.
Bryant clearly saw this as a smart play. But sometimes, the lines can blur between tactical usage and simply showing off.
THE UTAH JAZZ were leading by only six points just after halftime of their Dec. 26, 2023, game in San Antonio when Collin Sexton took a pass off a turnover for an open fast break to the basket.
“I was like, ‘You know what? Why not,'” Sexton said. What came next took everyone by surprise: an even flashier variation of the self alley-oop, this one off the floor for a 360 dunk.
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Collin Sexton throws down spectacular self alley-oop
Collin Sexton bounces the ball off the court, catches it midair, and finishes with style in a bold solo play.
Though the play seemed to have no tactical benefit beyond what a normal dunk or layup would have provided, Sexton viewed it as a shot in the arm for his teammates.
“It’s like a momentum change,” Sexton said. “Sometimes that allows the team to get fired up.”
Three minutes after Sexton’s dunk, the Jazz stretched the lead from six to 12, and they went on to win the game. Whether the play itself had any role as a galvanizing factor is anyone’s guess, but it seemingly didn’t hurt.
“You better make it,” Jazz coach Will Hardy said, with a heavy dose of deadpan tone. “But Collin made that dunk. And our team got a kick out of it, mostly because they knew I didn’t love it.
“There’s probably a crowd that’s like, ‘sanctity of the game, blah blah blah.’ I’m not one of those people. But I do recommend that you make it if you’re going for it. Because if you don’t, now we have to do the thing where I’m really mad.”
For his part, Sexton isn’t concerned about that risk. He says he hopes to do it again.
“If I get taken out, I get taken out,” he said with a large grin. “[Coach will] put me back in.”
Whether the self alley-oop is increasing in frequency around the NBA is difficult to prove, because neither the league nor private optical tracking systems register it specifically. Even within simple NBA play-by-play logs, varieties of self-oops seem to be logged inconsistently. Plays like Mitchell’s or Sexton’s, where the player was clearly passing to himself from the beginning, are simply labeled unassisted dunks. But a play like Brown’s, where the ball handler seems to abort his plan while in the air, is logged as a missed shot, rebound and subsequent putback.
Meanwhile, optical tracking systems appear to capture these plays as missed shots rebounded by the same player. But even with specialized requests, such systems currently are unable to differentiate between a self alley-oop and any other play in which a player rebounds his own miss and scores shortly after.
Still, Mazzulla said he and his staff have discussed it as a potential part of a game plan.
“The backboard could be used more in certain situations,” Mazzulla said. “On downhill veers, when a little guy tries to box out the big, if you throw it off the glass, he’s got the height advantage, he can get it.”
However it’s used, the self alley-oop is a remarkable moment in any NBA game. At its core, one might even say it’s the perfect embodiment of what makes basketball such a joy to watch.
“It can be something that’s pretty dope,” Mitchell said. “It’s creativity and just improvisation.”
