Pomeroy

[rome8180]

I'd also add that offensive personnel and play style don't seem to matter either. We've seen K have a good offense with OADs using a modern 4-out, 1-in. We've seen K have a good offense with a heavy emphasis on wing isos. We've seen him play a middle of the road tempo or pretty fast. And now we've seen him have a good offense with bad shooting and poor spacing.

 

[physicsfactor]

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.

You don't have to just leave them in the paint. I know Pants has advocated our bigs "sinking" (or whatever the 2017 term is) instead of hedging on ball screens.

 

[rome8180]

Yeah, I didn't really mean playing the back half of the defense as a zone. Just asking our bigs to recover over less distance. I guess, it would look something like Wisconsin's defense in 2015. A Tyus Jones could burn you, granted. I would hope that K would make an adjustment in that scenario instead of just letting it happen over and over.

 

[rome8180]

Not that Wisconsin's defense was particularly great that year. But I think with the added rim protection and rebounding and with a little additional pressure from our guards, we could play a better version of that.

 

[LastHearth]

"

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?

Because his recruits are almost always some of the best offensive players in each class? I;m sure if there were a ranking of the best defensive players in each class and he was recruiting from that top 25 list, Duke would be a much better defensive team inspite of youth and lack of continuity.

 

[Devilsforlife]

Discussions like this might edge out the snark as my favorite part of this board. Just incredibly substantive and informative. I can't really add much to what has already been said, but I wanted to say how much I enjoyed reading all the posts.

 

[TS9]

Discussions like this might edge out the snark as my favorite part of this board. Just incredibly substantive and informative. I can't really add much to what has already been said, but I wanted to say how much I enjoyed reading all the posts.

Honestly, Duke would have no fewer than 12 titles by now if K's flip phone was able to load TD-F.

 

[bdotling]

I mean we did save their season and won a natty because of the Okafor Theory

 

[SeanMayTriedToEatMe]

"

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?

Because his recruits are almost always some of the best offensive players in each class? I;m sure if there were a ranking of the best defensive players in each class and he was recruiting from that top 25 list, Duke would be a much better defensive team inspite of youth and lack of continuity.

Doesn't K's coaching play a big part in his freshmen being good at offense and bad at defense? Calipari got Towns and Cauley-Stein to play great defense on paper, and they have proven to be terrible defenders on paper in the NBA relative to other players their age. Towns in particular has been a drastic all-offense no-defense player under a coach known for defense. Jahlil Okafor had better defensive splits than either of them as a rookie. Kyrie Irving is a good to great defender this season. He instantly and dramatically changed his defensive results under new coaching with a new defensive scheme.

To claim K's freshmen are bad at defense compared to offense because they are bad at defense compared to offense is a circular argument that isn't based on anything. Jabari Parker, Austin Rivers, Brandon Ingram, Derryck Thornton, Marques Bolden, etc., with their size/agility, should not be defending worse than the average starting freshman or even the average starting player in general, over the entire landscape of 300+ D-I teams, which is what the Pomeroy continuity data is largely influenced by. If poor defense by elite athletes at Duke is due to low effort or low awareness, or bad fit for the defensive scheme, then that is a major coaching fault.

Wouldn't K be an idiot in terms of his talent evaluation and recruiting approach if he kept targeting great offensive players who were terrible defenders? Given that K has shown an ability to make basically any kind of offense with any kind of lineup work, and given that his defense has been shown to be inflexible, burned by the same sorts of offenses year after year, it would be basic common sense to try to recruit players that fit his defense better. More generally, it would be the most basic common sense to focus on overall two-way ability rather than one side of the ball.

For your argument to make sense, you would be saying K is an idiot for these other glaring reasons besides simply being bad at defensive coaching. I'm just saying he's bad at coaching defense, not trying to make him out to be senile. That's just insulting.

 

[rome8180]

Saw this elsewhere. I guess I will find it encouraging:

In the final 5 minutes of the last 3 games, Duke has held opponents to a paltry 5-25 shooting AND outscored foes by a combined 56-19. We finished Texas on a 12-5 run, Florida on a 15-2 run, and Indiana on a 16-6 run.

 

[TS9]

Saw this elsewhere. I guess I will find it encouraging:

In the final 5 minutes of the last 3 games, Duke has held opponents to a paltry 5-25 shooting AND outscored foes by a combined 56-19. We finished Texas on a 12-5 run, Florida on a 15-2 run, and Indiana on a 16-6 run.

Assuming that's due to actual defensive effort/success and not some fluky coincidence and/or choking by the opponent, if they can find it within themselves to perform at that level it for just 15-20 minutes a game, it just might be enough to win the vast majority of the games going forward.

 

[rome8180]

If they could defend that way the whole game, they'd be the greatest Duke team statistically since 2002 went #1 in offense and defense.

 

[deeyoukayeee]

The most difficult thing to understand is how a coach that constructed the 1, 15, 3, 2, 16, 6, 7, 28, 5 defenses from 02-10 (and likely similar results the two decades prior to KP), despite lots of poor 'eye test' defenders - Paulus, Melchionni, Redick, etc. - suddenly can't attain mediocrity with better talent. And some of those teams were pretty damn young. 2007 has no possible right to have been better than last year of this year.

How the fuck do you forget how to teach defense so completely and so consistently?

 

[deepdarkblue]

The most difficult thing to understand is how a coach that constructed the 1, 15, 3, 2, 16, 6, 7, 28, 5 defenses from 02-10 (and likely similar results the two decades prior to KP), despite lots of poor 'eye test' defenders - Paulus, Melchionni, Redick, etc. - suddenly can't attain mediocrity with better talent. And some of those teams were pretty damn young. 2007 has no possible right to have been better than last year of this year.

How the fuck do you forget how to teach defense so completely and so consistently?

Because the game changed but K didn't. K's defense is still made to defend against teams where players 3-5 can't handle the ball.

 

[LastHearth]

Doesn't K's coaching play a big part in his freshmen being good at offense and bad at defense? .

Of course his coaching plays a big part. I never implied otherwise. But I don't believe it's because he's not capable of coaching good defense. I think it's a conscious tradeoff decision to focus more on offense and less on defense. As a result Duke over the last 7 years have had more consistently good offensive teams but less good defensive teams.

Now if the question is whether his tradeoff was a good decision, and what prompted him to believe it's a good tradeoff, that's a more interesting question.

 

[SeanMayTriedToEatMe]

The conscious tradeoff theory would make some sense if K hadn't been able to consistently put together teams that played both elite offense and elite defense for his entire career until the last seven seasons. That's not a tradeoff. The defense has gotten worse. The offense has remained the same caliber relative to the rest of college basketball.

K simply chose to stop having elite defensive teams to go along with the elite offense? Come on. When someone can't even admit that K might not be as good a defensive coach as he once was, and says it's a conscious decision by K to have worse defenses, it's hard to take seriously.

 

[surfpenguin]

Agreed. Letting other teams destroy Duke with simple PNR's is not a conscious decision to trade defense for offense. It's just bad coaching.

 

[SeanMayTriedToEatMe]

To be fair, we're comparing K to his former self, which is the most unfair comparison any college basketball coach can have thrown at them. K from 86 to 11 was a clear #1 or #2 in terms of long-term coaching stretches in college basketball history. So it's not actually saying much to say he has gotten worse in some way, which is why it's so unbelievable to me that there are people who can't even admit it's possible that he has been losing something in coaching ability in recent years. I just want Scheyer, who is still spry and presumably good at math, to tell him how to fix some things.

 

[deeyoukayeee]

The most difficult thing to understand is how a coach that constructed the 1, 15, 3, 2, 16, 6, 7, 28, 5 defenses from 02-10 (and likely similar results the two decades prior to KP), despite lots of poor 'eye test' defenders - Paulus, Melchionni, Redick, etc. - suddenly can't attain mediocrity with better talent. And some of those teams were pretty damn young. 2007 has no possible right to have been better than last year of this year.

How the fuck do you forget how to teach defense so completely and so consistently?

Because the game changed but K didn't. K's defense is still made to defend against teams where players 3-5 can't handle the ball.

No doubt the evolution of the game, which he probably did more to bring about than anyone, has affected things.But 2010 was such a watershed. The game didn't change overnight. And teams like Louisville and WVA still manage to put up great defenses consistently while playing in-your-jock styles.

 

[LastHearth]

Kenpom Offensive ratings from 03-10: 13, 2, 13, 1, 44,13,7,1 Avg = 11.75
Kenpom Offensive ratings from 11-18: 5, 8,4,1,3,4,6,1 Avg= 4


Kenpom Defensive ratings from 03-10: 15,3,2,16,6,7,28,5 Avg= 10.25
Kenpom Denfensive ratings from 11-18: 9, 79,26,86,11,86,47,46 Avg=48

So from 03 to 10, Duke denfese and offense averages just outside of the top 10, with defense being slightly better.
Then the OAD era started and Duke's offense went to the stratosphere, and the defense crashed and burned. Now you can say that he somehow became even more of an savant coaching offense but somehow completely lost his ability to coach defense, or you can say his decisions over the last 8 years, both in terms of coaching and recruiting, have skewed toward producing better offense at the cost of reducing defensive performance.