The Flex Offense Is Born
1967. Rene Herrerias designs a system of constant motion
In 1967, Rene Herrerias was coaching the University of California, Berkeley, and his team had a problem: UCLA's star center Lew Alcindor, later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, controlled the area near the basket.
Herrerias designed an offense to pull big men away from the rim. Players cut across the lane off a baseline screen, the flex cut, and then the screener got a down screen of his own. Coaches call this "screen the screener". At first it was called the Cha Cha.
The Flex spread to high schools and colleges across the country, because the pattern is easy to teach and keeps all five players moving. Jerry Sloan later ran his own version with the Utah Jazz for more than two decades.
What changed
In the Flex, every player screens, cuts and handles the ball, so a team can run it without a star creator. It showed that a repeating pattern, run with patience, can wear down even a defense built around a dominant shot blocker.
In the Dictionary: Flex Cut