In many ways, the NBA tends to be the league that’s ahead of its time. It’s the best league in the world, it has the deepest coaching pool, and it’s usually where you first see new concepts take shape before they spread elsewhere.
Memphis Grizzlies / Schedule
But lately, we’re seeing more and more “finished” trends arrive from outside the United States—often brought in or refined by international coaches.
One of the clearest examples is the tagging-up system: an offensive rebounding framework that’s directly tied to transition defense.
It’s become increasingly common across the league, and while some teams build it into the core of their identity and others tweak it in their own way, it has clearly contributed to the recent spike in offensive rebounding.
This season, multiple teams have pushed into 30%+ offensive rebounding rate territory, with Houston separating itself from the pack.
The bigger story isn’t just the raw numbers, it’s how teams are getting those extra possessions without getting punished on the other end.
The Old Basketball Trade-Off
For most of basketball history, coaches treated offensive rebounding and transition defense like a direct trade-off.
If you send bodies to the glass, you risk giving up runouts. If you prioritize getting back, you sacrifice second-chance points. At the NBA level—especially throughout the 2010s—teams largely chose to get back.
It was the safe, modern decision: defend in transition, protect the paint early, and live with fewer extra possessions. That created a philosophical fork in the road for every organization
The tagging-up system is such a big deal because, when executed correctly, it blends those two priorities into one concept.
What “Tagging Up” Actually Means
Anyone who has played or coached basketball has heard the classic rebounding teaching points:
Stay in front of your man
Fight for inside position
Win the lane
Go get it
That’s the traditional offensive rebounding battle: get in front, establish leverage, and attack the ball.
Tagging up flips that logic.
Instead of racing to get in front, the emphasis is on creating strong, controlled contact from the side or from behind—“pinning” your matchup in place and shrinking his space while you pursue the rebound.
The system is designed to keep players connected to an assignment as the shot goes up, so that even if the offense doesn’t secure the board, the defense is already organized by matchups rather than scrambling in panic, it is a great base for full-court press as well, as by tagging up behind the player you stick with matchups and control the transition defense better.
In the purest version, it’s basically “five to the glass,” but with structure—not chaos. The guiding idea is simple: crash like it matters, but crash with rules.
The Contact Detail That Makes It Work
Tagging up only works if the contact is taught properly. You can’t turn it into obvious shoving. Players have to learn how to create contact in a way that doesn’t look like a foul.
The goal isn’t “hands on the back.” It’s a controlled bump-and-stay—continuous body contact for a second or two—so you can gradually displace your man and narrow his rebounding window.
This is where the system becomes more than just a rebounding trick. If you teach it the wrong way, you’ll get fouls, frustration, and a concept that dies quickly.
If you teach it the right way, you get something far more valuable than an occasional extra board: you get a team that consistently controls space and controls matchups on every shot.
Why This System Fits the Modern Game
Tagging up didn’t rise in a vacuum. It fits the current geometry of basketball. The NBA is a three-point-heavy league.
More threes means more long rebounds, more weird bounces, and more possessions where the rebound isn’t simply a big man’s box-out under the rim.
Guards and wings are involved constantly, because the ball is coming down outside the paint—sometimes outside the free-throw line. Tagging up is built for that world.
When you pin a defender and shrink his space, you don’t just stop him from sprinting out in transition—you also increase your odds of winning those unpredictable 50–50 rebounds that bounce long.
And because more players are crashing, more defenders are forced to stay engaged, which naturally slows the opponent’s ability to leak out.
That’s the hidden genius: done correctly, aggressive crashing doesn’t have to mean reckless transition defense. The crash itself becomes part of your transition defense.
From International Concept to NBA Trend
Splitter
Splitter
Credit AP - Scanpix
A major reason tagging up has gained traction is that the concept has been taught and refined by coaches with international backgrounds and coaching networks outside the mainstream NBA pipeline.
The recent wave is often traced through the work of New Zealand coach Paul Henare, whose methods influenced NBA coaches looking for a new edge.
And Henare’s influence connects back to Australian coach Aaron Fearne, who is widely credited with formalizing and teaching tagging-up principles in a clear, transferable way.
This is also where Tuomas Iisalo enters the picture. Iisalo used tagging-up concepts in Europe before arriving in the NBA, and the approach has become closely associated with the way his teams connect physical offensive rebounding with organized defensive transition.
To be clear: no single coach “owns” the idea of physical contact and matchup responsibility. But certain coaches deserve credit for making the concept teachable, scalable, and modern—and for showing that it can work at a high level against elite athletes.
The Two Versions Teams Actually Use
In real life, almost no team runs “pure” five-man tagging up on every possession. Even the most aggressive teams pick their spots. So what you typically see across the league falls into two categories.
Team-wide tagging up (system tagging)
This is when tagging up becomes a foundational rule: players stay connected to matchups, the crash is coordinated, and transition defense flows directly out of those assignments.
It’s the version that can support full-court pressure—or at least a very controlled transition response—because players already know who they’re responsible for as soon as the shot goes up. The opponent isn’t running into chaos. They’re running into structure.
“Individual tagging up” (situational tagging)
This is the modular version, and it’s why the concept spreads so quickly.
You don’t need five guys doing it. You can teach it to specific rebounders—often wings and guards with elite physicality—and get value immediately.
Instead of trying to sprint in front of their man, these players stay attached, initiate contact from the side or on the back, and use that controlled bump to move the opponent off his spot.
This is where athletes like Amen Thompson become weapons. Even without a full five-man commitment, a couple of players creating the right contact can swing multiple 50–50 rebounds over the course of a game, and those extra possessions often decide outcomes.
Vukašin Nedeljković
Vukašin played basketball competitively in his youth, and now contributes to Synergy Sports Technology and Sportradar regarding basketball analysis. He also has experience working as a journalist in Serbia and is passionate about writing basketball articles mainly focused on basketball X's and O's.
About author
Subscribe to BN+ and get access to exclusive content.
If you like our content, please click here and add us as your preferred source. It helps us a lot, and we are committed to delivering you the very latest basketball news.