Turbo > Ozone
Like for a significant portion of the season we asked him to cover two positions and he’s done it very well. Then for a couple games he did it less well. But still! It’s a very hard thing we are asking him to do!
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I think this discussion has “popped” up here before. Turbo is indeed > Ozone. But Hispanic dude on the bad squad was >>>> than both.
We’ve had great defenders before. No idea how much better the metrics say he is than any of them but the eye test doesn’t put him light years ahead of anyone IMO. Best? Maybe, but best of more than a few very, very good defenders. Some of whom brought more to the to the table offensively than he does, and some of them didn’t get drafted at all. None of them were considered lottery picks after year two.
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I’ll give him best potential as a defender but no he’s not the best right now. Brogdon was way better. So was Akil. Dunn makes too many mental errors to be in that club yet. I think playing the 4 instead of normally defending guards is holding him back a little, just my opinion.
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Will give you Malc (maybe), not Akil
Dunn can do things / affect games in ways that Akil couldn’t. Akil was “sounder” in his 3rd/4th year
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If I see Dunn jump on another pump fake or leave his man to help in a situation that doesn’t need help and leads to a wide open 3… I swear to god.
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Then you’ll have seen it a small handful of times, as compared to the large handful of plays he makes that that the other candidates for best ever wouldn’t have been in the zip code of making
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To me, Dunn is the best off-ball defender we’ve had. But guys like Malcolm, Akil, and Dre were better on-ball defenders. We could put those guys on the best player on the other team, and they would take them out of the game. But Dunn really impacts the overall team defense, and I’ll agree with HGN saying he has the most upside potential as a defender.
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Maybe I havent paid attention enough the last several games. But have we tried a Dunn/Groves/BB front court? Wonder how that would go.
Dont think thats been the case the last few games.
Also a lot of those “plays the best ever wouldnt have been in the zip code of making” would not exist in the first place had we not doubled down on hedging and doubling as opposed to straight man
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4 possessions against Texas Southern. I’ve also thought of a way to get Groves to the wing…
If Buchanan were more playable (maybe near the end of the season) and we had some front court depth that’s probably our best lineup.
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I’m tempted to agree, but for me, the hedging and doubling is one aspect of our traditional defense that causes a bit of chaos. For a while, that chaos was working to our advantage, but recently, it’s been creating lots of open looks for good teams (and also ND).
Also, if we don’t have a solid defender at the 5 (and we won’t, as long as we have to play Groves there, for his offense), I’m not sure we can just try to play traditional tough man to man. That would seem to require Minor playing ~20-25 or so. Am I off base?
I dont if Groves defending man in the post is worse than him getting punished off a slow hedge recovery and the ball rotating to the open 3 point shooter.
Im just of the mentality (in thinking of our future UNC game) of letting Bacot get his 40 pt, 30 rebound game and shutting everyone else rather than trying to hedge and double which leads to wide open 3s for Davis Cormac Ingram etc. Where we have to have ryan dunn running around trying to close out on someone.
Chaos has only really been successful against teams with poor ball security, which is why I have hope vs Louisville.
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The good trend for Dunn is he’s getting on the offensive glass lately. 4+ offensive rebounds in the last three games. Granted that’s padded by rebounding his own misses at the rim several times but still. He had only gotten 4 ORs once before, vs NC A&T. They need that from him. It’s his best way to create offense.
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The chaos also worked well against TAMU, which has been an excellent ball security team in games not against us.
To me, it’s a question of tradeoffs: do we get enough disruption and turnover generation against the chaos that it’s worth being vulnerable to giving up the open looks? Dunn is definitely a good representative of this tradeoff and how defense for this team looks really different from any past TB team.
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Agree, plus and sorta what I was getting at earlier: what’s the baseline for the tradeoff? in other words, what would a “stay home” defense look like? And with which center?
I think the first domino in all this was realizing we needed Groves’s shooting out there, on offense. So everything flowed from that. RD wasn’t a good enough shooter/scorer to move to the 3, so Groves goes to 5, and RD helps out, as the 4. And when you’re playing the boot scooting boogie frontcourt, are you better off staying home, or hedging/doubling? So far, it’s been hedging/doubling, and that in turns helps the offense a bit, but that may be changing…
If the offense were good enough to play Minor, or if Minor were good enough to play on offense, then maybe a “just stay home” defense suits us pretty well. I tend to think that either (1) Minor needs to stay home on defense, or (2) Minor needs to play a lot more to get comfortable in the system. But if we keep playing Minor sporadically and trying to get him to double and hedge, I’m not sure that’s the right answer…
I’m rambling… back to the main point: However good we think RD is at defense, the major draft analysts seem to think, or think that NBA front offices will think, that RD is very good at defense (to be fair, much of it still potential).
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I’ll take Braxton Key over both of those guys.
IMO- best defender to this point under CTB.
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They were Missing Radford though… would
Be like us missing McKneely or Rohde.