All ball screen defense all of the time!
Breaking down 35 different ball screen defensive sets; discussing what went poorly, what went well, and proposed adjustments.
This one’s more for the folks who really like to sink their teeth into one specific topic/pain point.
Awesome!
One thing to note: From 3:21 to end of first half, that was the strong defensive stretch. But Pitt ran a completely different offense, a bit of a 4 out 1 in / continuity thing. They stopped doing the super high ball screen.
So I couldn’t tell if we made a smart, intentional decision about changing how we hedged, or we just changed it out of necessity given their offense.
You sort of note this on the first clip at 3:21 but it’s true throughout.
During the game I thought it was an intentional choice we made after going small ball, but in retrospect it seems like much more of a reactive thing we did when Pitt stopped the high ball screen. (Which might explain what we did in the second half - it wasn’t a reversion back to hedging so much as a continuation).
Yeah - it’s true.
There were a few times some of our players didn’t attack a higher ball screen during that stretch - but their offense played into that - they also did that to start the second half some, though, and we had some issues with it.
I agree with all of your thoughts re: was it an intentional choice or was it just a reaction to how Pitt was playing. Seems more like the latter - but still lessons learned, IMO, around how playing more compact was helpful.
I’ll add a note to make that more clear.
@zh00s Added a little extra note in there after that clip to build on that thought and make it more clear that while I thought we’d figured something out, it appeared more circumstantial.
Good call out, thank you.
oh cool. but not a call out either! Mostly me trying to make sense of what I was seeing for myself more than anything.
I’ll probably go back and watch some second half to see if Pitt ran the same thing as they did at the end of the 1st to see what we did. That’d be instructive (I don’t think they did really?)
We started hard hedging too much with Blake at the end of the Miami game. It didn’t hurt as much, but he was way over-hedging and getting beat back in the last 5 minutes of the Miami game.
For some reason we resorted to the crazy switch/hard hedge last night stranding Jake on PGs several times in the 2H. Why? I don’t understand Tony’s rationale for going away from got us the 8 straight wins. It was truly bizarre and I was yelling at the TV to stop having the hedges go PAST the dribbler.
Hope I never see that defensive strategy ever again. They were dribbling 30ft from the basket and we were hedging as if the dribbler would pull up for a shot at any moment.
As you said, it was just like the earlier games in the season when we were getting torched.
Plus, the other bad thing about having Minor on the bench was that our screens for iMac and Jake were soft and didn’t create any space. Having Minor out was a double negative.
Only word that comes to mind is “bizarre”…why were we doing it? and worse, why did we KEEP doing it when it was getting sliced/and diced like a Ginsu knife commercial.
Go Hoos. Play free and with JOY. Have fun. Beat Wake.
It was a different offense but they opened the second half with a similarly compacted offense not setting high ball screens. That one was playing through getting the ball to the post player at the point and then running zoom screens into a hand off. It’s basically what got Minor benched again.
Yeah. I’ve been constantly asking myself that question, “why?” around the strategies. Not around why we tried it initially, but why did we keep doing it?
The only things I can think of are either that we liked what we saw on the two turnovers in the first half and were trying to replicate that (which, Pitt adjusted to), or that we’d come into the came with several different strategies on how we were going to approach their high ball screen and wanted to stick with those options/thought we could just execute better throughout rather than shifting to a different strategy that they hadn’t practiced for this game.
But I don’t think either of those are satisfactory answers if either are true.
It mostly just seemed like philosophically CTB just got taken back to that early season mode where he thought we were ready to implement the defense he wanted us to run and, also, thought we’d be able to better defend/score with them if we played small.
I’m still not sure why we made it SUCH a priority to not let our ball defenders just fight through screens, though. So rarely were they scoring through Carrington, Lowe, or Leggett getting into the lane and, when they did, it was usually because of us overplaying on the perimeter.
You mean the real masochistic Sickos.
Which is me, of course… diving in now.
“You mean the real masochistic Sickos.”
Yes. Well translated.
An explanation to unite the “Tony is a HOF coach, trust the process” crew with the dissenters AKA “We could coach this team to a natty from our armchairs” crew…
Tony knew that based on talent, we could probably still beat Pitt and this was our last opportunity to prove we incorporate concepts that could raise our ceiling before hitting a tough schedule. Worst case is that Wake would be equally confused by our strategy and be ill prepared for Saturday.
3D chess by a hall of famer.
To the above point, will also remind my fellow dissenters that has often been a topic that we’d rather lose more games in the ACC schedule to better prepare for March.
Caveat that that’s usually in the scope of playing younger guys but I digress…
If you wanted to try some new concepts you should maybe do it against a team that isn’t on a roll like Pitt. BC or GT come to mind.
It also isn’t really a new concept. We ran really similar concepts all year and got our shit rocked when we did
My guess is close to this.
Tony likes the packline version we’ve played traditionally. He always preaches getting the building blocks right and then you can take a step forward.
In my mind, they made the tweaks to simplify post Wake, guys settled in, and he thought now was a time to try to take a step forward. Which really was a step forward to the original baseline. But it didn’t work.
Now, there’s still the question of why we stuck with it throughout. I’d guess a stubbornness thing or wanting to be sure it wasn’t fluky (giving guys the chance to get it right).
That’s my guess based on how he rolls. I don’t think it’s inherently bad, but we need to experiment with it in tighter cycles so we don’t get bulldozed if it’s not working.
Yep, one of the great mysteries.
One of the things that I noticed in the Cuts that wasn’t as apparent live, was just how many errors Dunn made.
And rather than be frustrated with Dunn, it’s more frustrating that we are neutralizing some of that natural talent and/or athletic ability to recover (for either himself or another) by hard hedging him.
Wow, that is a thesis level dissection! Reliving our numerous self-inflicted wounds didn’t help my blood pressure though. Definitely give credit to Capel. He won the game with his schemes.