Baskets
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Best
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Two on one to the basket. Pull the defender onto you, then give the ball away — the ring tells you exactly whether the shot goes in.
Two attackers, one defender, one basket. Everybody runs at the rim by themselves, so the only two decisions you ever make are when to pass and when to shoot. Tap your team-mate to pass him the ball; tap anywhere else to shoot.
The ring drawn around whoever has the ball is the shot itself. Green means the shot will go in, grey means it will not, and nothing is left to chance — the ring is wide when you are open and near the rim, and it collapses as the defender arrives. There is no lucky basket and no unlucky miss in this game.
That turns the whole thing into one idea: make the defender commit to you, then give the ball away. While he is on you your ring is dead but your team-mate is completely open. The catch is that the pass takes time to arrive and the shot takes time to leave your hands, and he starts recovering the instant the ball does.
Each basket brings a faster defender who also hangs further back, splitting the difference between the two of you instead of chasing the ball. That makes him harder to commit and quicker to recover, and past a certain speed no sequence of passes can beat him at all — which is why every run ends. Get contested, get the ball stolen, or run out the six-second clock, and it is over. Your score is baskets made.
The pass is not the point — the commit is. Passing while the defender is still parked between you two just hands him a shorter distance to cover, and on the later breaks it hands him the interception. Wait until he is genuinely on you, close enough that your own ring has gone flat, and only then release. That ring going dark is not a warning, it is the signal.
Shoot on the catch, not after it. The shot takes a fixed time to leave your hands and the defender is closing the whole time, so the ring you see when you tap is not the ring that decides the basket. A shot taken half a second after the catch is a completely different shot, and on the faster breaks it is the difference between green and grey.
Let the two of you get up the floor first. Distance to the rim is half of the ring: the same spacing that is worthless at half-court is a comfortable green near the basket. Early passes waste your six seconds and put the ball in the air while nobody is a threat yet, which is exactly when the defender can afford to sit in the middle.
From around the sixth basket the defender stops chasing and starts splitting you. He is no longer committing to the ball at all, so waiting for him to arrive will simply run out the clock. Against that you have to become a real threat first — carry the ball right into scoring range so he has no choice but to step across, and then pass into the space he just left.
One pass is almost always better than two. Every extra pass is another flight time for him to read, and because he recovers towards the middle, the second pass usually arrives just as he gets there. If the first swing did not produce a green ring, the answer is rarely to swing it back — it is to have drawn him a step deeper before you let go.