Alley-oop (basketball)

An alley-oop in basketball is an offensive play in which one player throws the ball near the basket to a teammate who jumps, catches the ball in mid air and puts it in the hoop before touching the ground.

The alley-oop combines elements of teamwork, pinpoint passing, timing and finishing.

In the 1950s, some players began utilizing jumping abilities by grabbing balls in mid-air and then dunking. Bill Russell at the University of San Francisco, Wilt Chamberlain at Kansas University and 'Jumping' Johnny Green at Michigan State University would frequently grab errant shots by teammates and dunk them. This resulted in a tightening in the enforcement of offensive goaltending rules in NCAA and NBA basketball in the late 1950s.

Al Tucker and his brother Gerald at Oklahoma Baptist University are sometimes credited with being the first to use the alley-oop in the mid-60s. In Bill Walton's record-setting 44-point, 21-for-22 shooting performance for UCLA in the 1973 NCAA championship game against Memphis State, six of his baskets came on alley-oop plays.

Some others credit David Thompson as the first player to execute the classic alley-oop play while at North Carolina State University, with his teammates Monte Towe and Tim Stoddard performing the necessary lob passes. NCSU's Thompson popularized the play during the early 1970s, exploiting his 44-inch vertical leap to make the above-the-rim play a recurring staple in the Wolfpack's offensive attack. Because dunking was illegal in college basketball at that time, upon catching the pass, Thompson would simply drop the ball through the hoop – never dunking one until the final play of the final home game of his career.

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Wikipedia