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Pomeroy

The conundrum and the risk right now is that the M2M isn't going to get better unless they play through the shittiness and work on it. But if things don't start getting better, there will be a point when a decision to give up on it will have to be made, and hopefully that will happen in time for them to still maximize whatever the zone can be. I don't think any of this will make much difference in December, since the schedule is so light, but after that the balancing act could become pretty delicate.
 
Yeah I get it, just posing the question of whether zone has a chance to work alongside this offense.

My vote would be to default to one or the other based on the matchup (eg zone Louisville and man Notre Dame), making a change mid game if results are bad. If we are going to continue to play/develop both, let’s deploy them each when most logical. I’ll take the risk that some terrible shooting team will go off against the zone in the NCAAT if that’s the matchup we draw.

I would note that in 2015, the last four matchups in the tournament were all against top 80 three point shooting teams, two of which were top 10. So it was certainly good that our man defense rose to the occasion, but the draw may not always be like that.
 
I know some people here scoff at this and say stuff like, "You can't simulate real game experience!" but there's these things called practices where they could be working quite intensively on m2m while still winning games with the zone. Somehow others coaches have their teams' m2m defenses ready to go at the beginning of the season without having played tried it in a game.
 
physicsfactor said:
I know some people here scoff at this and say stuff like, "You can't simulate real game experience!" but there's these things called practices where they could be working quite intensively on m2m while still winning games with the zone. Somehow others coaches have their teams' m2m defenses ready to go at the beginning of the season without having played tried it in a game.
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Those coaches have 2 Srs and 2 Jrs in their starting lineups who have honed their m2m during 1200min of real game experience.
 
I'm not trying to a douche, but are there any articles/blogs/whatever out there with evidence that team defense is better with players who played more minutes the previous season? I think that would be an interesting endeavor for someone like kenpom.

Now that I think about it, it still wouldn't tell me that much because I could easily argue that those players benefited more from all of the extra practices over the years in their programs.
 
Anyway, I agree that the defense would likely be better if Duke had a bunch of upperclassmen out there, but I still think it's silly to completely excuse poor defense simply because the team is young. Hell, look at the 2007 Duke team. They were extremely young for a Duke team at that time, but they were a top 10 defense playing guys like one-footed Greg Paulus heavy minutes. The 2000 and 2003 Duke teams played lots of young guys as well, and they were very good defensively.
 
That could be a great article - I am too lazy/incompetent to write it - but you could compare returning minutes to returning years in program to try to tease out the difference. Would you rather enter the year with a Sr who played hardly at all or a soph who played a lot the year before?
 
physicsfactor said:
You're not going to win a title playing a shitty m2m that's worse than your zone, especially if that m2m gives you bad losses that hurt seeding (hopefully this won't happen in ACC play like every other year).
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Obviously. But we probably won't win a title just playing strictly zone, either. We need to get better at man, and it's not even December yet, so I have no problem continuing to run it. If our man doesn't get better it will limit our ceiling.
 
niveklaen said:
physicsfactor said:
See? Told ya.

Anyway, have you ever watched Kentucky play defense?
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yeah - they are the exception that proves the rule. Cal does a great job getting his frosh to play d. much better than k.
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Not sure if it proves the rule, but the opposite. I don't think there is a rule that freshmen can't play defense. I think freshmen under Coach K can't play an aggressive overplay defense that requires a ton of communication and doesn't have much benefit to it over other defenses even when played perfectly by seniors. I mean, seriously: What is the point of it? It doesn't force turnovers anymore. And Ken Pomeroy published something showing that defense controls three-point percentage less than any other part of the offense besides FT percentage. The only thing is does well is limit three-point attempts. Is that worth it to make yourself vulnerable to any team with penetrating guards or who can run a decent pick and roll?
 
As for needing to improve our man to man, isn't there a more conservative version of man we could improve on? Something that still involves some pressure from our guards but has our bigs stay home in the lane?

I should also maybe ask: how would we describe Cal's defense? What exactly is his scheme?
 
rome8180 said:
As for needing to improve our man to man, isn't there a more conservative version of man we could improve on? Something that still involves some pressure from our guards but has our bigs stay home in the lane?

I should also maybe ask: how would we describe Cal's defense? What exactly is his scheme?
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We have scaled back our m2m. We aren't playing Coach K's traditional 'overplay' anymore. We just are struggling with pretty basic fundamentals- players hug their man, on a pass and cut to the corner Trent Jr for example will follow all the way through, etc. Our positioning is really bad.
 
I don't think it has scaled back that far. Duke has still been beaten backdoor several times because they are too aggressively denying one pass away. Also, our bigs are still hard hedging pretty far out often causing confusion on if they are or are not switching, and the help-recovery has too far to go.

I should add that the zone rotations haven't exactly been stellar, but at least it seems to force a lot more jumpers instead of layups.
 
rome8180 said:
As for needing to improve our man to man, isn't there a more conservative version of man we could improve on? Something that still involves some pressure from our guards but has our bigs stay home in the lane?
Click to expand...

I've wondered the same lately. Just keep the bigs in the post to discourage penetration and perhaps improve defensive rebounding, etc. Let the other three guys do whatever – whether they're playing a zone or a 3-person man thing. Seems so pointless to have Carter and Bagley switching onto guards and then trying to race back into the post, or leaving Grayson and Duval down there to try to defend against layups or block dunk attempts.

I'm sure there are downsides to this type of defense, but I'll let the smarter people explain what they are.

But as I think I've said before, I don't really have any idea what K's goals on defense are anymore.
 
TS9 said:
rome8180 said:
As for needing to improve our man to man, isn't there a more conservative version of man we could improve on? Something that still involves some pressure from our guards but has our bigs stay home in the lane?
Click to expand...

I've wondered the same lately. Just keep the bigs in the post to discourage penetration and perhaps improve defensive rebounding, etc. Let the other three guys do whatever – whether they're playing a zone or a 3-person man thing. Seems so pointless to have Carter and Bagley switching onto guards and then trying to race back into the post, or leaving Grayson and Duval down there to try to defend against layups or block dunk attempts.

I'm sure there are downsides to this type of defense, but I'll let the smarter people explain what they are.

But as I think I've said before, I don't really have any idea what K's goals on defense are anymore.
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One obvious downside is defending ball screens vs guards who are threats to pull-up from 3. But I say adjust when you face one of those.
 
Just leaving bigs in the paint on ball screens is not a reasonable fix. Our ball screen defense has improved from last season. From what I can see after a reverse or two on the perimeter we get absolutely crushed. We can't sustain solid m2m principles for more than 15 seconds. It's really bad.
 
physicsfactor said:
I don't think it has scaled back that far. Duke has still been beaten backdoor several times because they are too aggressively denying one pass away. Also, our bigs are still hard hedging pretty far out often causing confusion on if they are or are not switching, and the help-recovery has too far to go.

I should add that the zone rotations haven't exactly been stellar, but at least it seems to force a lot more jumpers instead of layups.
Click to expand...
This matches my eye test. When I rewatch the game from last night and the Florida game, as I inevitably will, I will try to play closer attention to the positioning of our bigs.
 
Yeah there's no "exception that proves the rule" when it comes to Duke-like teams, in terms of experience and talent level, playing defense well or not well.

There are only two teams that have been similar to Duke in this way for the past several years: Duke and Kentucky. Kentucky doing something well that Duke doesn't do well, and vice versa, wouldn't be an exception or a trend or anything, really. It would just be the other data point out of two that we can possibly look at.

Pomeroy has already done a basic study of continuity vs. offensive/defensive performance: https://kenpom.com/blog/measuring-continuity/

"Not surprisingly, teams with more continuity tend to perform better, with the effect being stronger on offense. The following plots show data for all teams since 2008.

continuity_o.png
continuity_d.png

"

The question this raises about K is why can he get teams with minimal continuity to perform so well on offense, but not on defense, when the trend across all programs and coaches is for a lack of continuity to have a stronger negative effect on offense? When it comes to offense, he really could be called The Master un-ironically. Why can't he match that as a defensive coach?
 
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