Your best shooter should never be the safety

Sending the same player back on every possession quietly removes him from the offensive rebound and from the trail three.

Floor balance rules tend to be written by position. The point guard gets back. Everybody else reads the shot. Simple, teachable, and it takes the most valuable spot on the floor away from the player you most want in it.

The safety is doing two jobs on a miss. He is the first line of transition defence, which is the job everyone talks about, and he is also the player who does not participate in the second chance. That second part is a real cost. On a long rebound off a three, the ball frequently comes out past the arc, and the player standing at the top of the key is in the best position on the floor to collect it and shoot again immediately against a defence that has already turned. Assign your worst shooter there and you have converted a decent scoring chance into a reset.

So I would pick the safety by shooting ability rather than by position, and I would pick low. The man who is least useful on a kickout is the man who should be standing at half court. If that is your centre because he does not shoot from distance, so be it. He is slower getting back than the guard would be, yes, and slower is a cost, but slower with the right five on the floor beats faster with your best shooter parked in the wrong place.

There is a second version of the same idea that teams handle better and still not well. Not every miss deserves the same balance. A rushed contested jumper is a likely long rebound and a likely break the other way, so send two back. A clean look from a good shooter is more likely to be a short miss or a make, so crash and let the safety be nominal.

Players can read that. The rules just have to be written in terms of shot quality rather than jersey number, and coaches keep writing them the easy way instead.

What I would love to see is a team that lists its floor balance assignments per lineup rather than per position, changing when the personnel changes, published on the whiteboard.

Then at least the person standing at half court would know why he is the one who is there.