Welcome!

By registering with us, you'll be able to discuss, share and private message with other members of our community.

SignUp Now!

Pomeroy

You're letting one obvious outlier skew your offensive average for 03-10 though.

Also, it makes more sense to put 2011 with the previous grouping. Kyrie hardly played with those guys. That was mostly experienced team with much more in common with the previous team and not the teams that followed.
 
Plenty of really silly things in that post, along with what physicsfactor said.

Ignoring that there is basically no difference between a ranking of 11.75 and a ranking of 10.25, while the difference between 4 and 48 is enormous.

We got better by 1.50 ranks on average starting with the Kyrie season when including the drastic outlier 2007 season. Must be focusing more on offense. Do you really think people here are buying this?

What do you think the rankings look like for Duke 2001, 2000 and 1999 on offense and defense, and what would happen to the averages if those rankings were included in the pre-Kyrie period?

Just be a rational person. K is not a total braindead moron. He's not intentionally choosing for his team to be drastically worse on defense in exchange for some insignificant uptick on offense.
 
Last edited:
I think you're making presumptions without actually looking at the numbers.

Let's take look at last 3 years (because I'm too lazy to do the last 10 years), the 12th best offense and the 4th best offense had an average difference in efficiency of 3.2, the difference average difference between the 11th best defense and the 48th best defense in efficiency is 4.4.

So on average you can say he sacrificed 4.4 defensive efficiency for 3.2 in offensive efficiency, still not a great exchange but certainly not the "drastically worse on defense in exchange for some insignificant uptick on offense." that you're making it out to be. And when you take in consideration the idea of diminishing returns, that it takes more work improve your efficiency when you're already near the top. Improving efficiency by 3.2 when you're already #12 on offense may require an increase in time and resources as the commensurate time and resources taken away from the #11 defense that drops efficiency by 4.4.

Of course we're still left with the question of why make this bargain at all, maybe he should have just left it alone and stuck with with his near top 10 in both instead of the top 5 in O and top 50 in D.

I'm of the opinion he should have just left it alone.
 
I post a lot of stupid things on this board and say a lot of nonsense in real life that is clearly wrong like 2 seconds later. The worst people are the ones who can never be wrong. Then again, President of the United States, so maybe they’re the most successful among us.
 
rome8180 said:
As for ...

But as I think I've said before, I don't really have any idea what K's goals on defense are anymore.
Click to expand...

[/QUOTE]


I think I saw somewhere that K was trying to limit 3pt attempts. noticed something on hoop-math about this recently, but the site is down right now so I cant pull the exact numbers - went something like this - while Duke has been in the top 20 each of the last 5 years in limiting 3pt attempts, none of the other teams in the top 20 have had a top 200 defense other than Duke - K has chosen to be consistently excellent at something that only terrible defensive teams do.
 
rome8180 said:
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.
Click to expand...

This combined with SMTTEM's experience charts really scratched an itch. The chaos and permutations of offensive lineups hasn't had nearly the adverse affect on efficiency than the slightly less difficult to master defensive efficiency.

You almost wonder whether or not practice time has radically shifted. Maybe there is a subconscious effort to reward short timers with a greater focus on the more illusory outcome of offensive excellence. Regardless of what they may claim, NBA drafting still tends to skew towards offense. Because Okafor and Jabari (and Lonzo/Fultz).
 
I'm not sure I buy the assumption that we couldn't win a title with a zone. Why not? We have the kind of freak athletes to theoretically guard the arc pretty well, and rebounding shouldn't be an issue. Plus, we just beat the next-best team playing zone, and it wasn't exploited by arguably most zone-busty contender (UF) when we switched to it.

Also, we may have backed off the trying-to-get-5-second-calls-at-halfcourt thing, but I don't see where STF's claim that K has significantly dialed back overplay is coming from. See this play, for example:

- Allen (one pass away) is extended past the 3PT line in ball denial
- Trent (on the ball) is extended 7-8 feet beyond the 3PT line
- Wing defenders are fairly tight on the corner shooters and Javin doesn't even show on help
- We try to (sort of) hedge a 25'+ PnR and have Trent go over it, instead of just going under it

I mean, that's overplay, with all of its flaws. It limits "show" help from wing defenders (e.g. swiping at the ball and creating traffic without abandoning shooters), delays weakside rim rotations, and draws bigs away from the rim adds vertical driving space by playing PNRs so aggressively.

Lastly, here's a good article on PNR defense options. I'm less opinionated about it this year, given how agile our bigs are, but the "zone up" strategy in the article = the "sink" strategy physics mentioned earlier. Honestly, it probably makes sense if you're always playing freshmen, regardless of who they are. It's just harder to fuck up.
 
physicsfactor said:
I remained convinced that his system breaks down at extremely slow tempos and regularly overvalues teams like UVA, Bo Ryan's Wisconsin teams, Jamie Dixon's Pitt teams, etc.
Click to expand...

It is weird and does seem like a blind spot, doesn't it? My initial thought was that at such few possessions, you can get really fucked by statistical fluctuations in shooting % from an opposing team, but it's not that different (62 vs. our 71). And maybe 5 tournament flame outs in a row or w/e is still too small a sample and we won't even be talking about it if they make the final four this year, but it's hard to explain that in combination with his very poor record vs. Duke.

Only thing I can think of that I can't be assed to look into further is that when they fall behind late in games they aren't practiced or capable of mounting comebacks at a higher tempo, whereas with a "normal" team they can speed up their offense without too much difficulty.
 
I was surprised I haven’t seen Collins or Wojo’s name anywhere in this discussion... I think the tendency to give K all or none of the credit for the good defenses seems misplaced. Collins left having 1 truly bad defensive team during his time (12) and Wojo had 2 (12, 14). Definitely think returning playing experience has a major part, probably the majority of it (a strategic decision which falls on K) but want to give Wojo especially some credit for many years of great defense.

Or maybe I’m being an idiot and you all are already including the other coaches in your proclamations about K so the (+ staff) is implied.
 
dukedavidson13 said:
I was surprised I haven’t seen Collins or Wojo’s name anywhere in this discussion... I think the tendency to give K all or none of the credit for the good defenses seems misplaced. Collins left having 1 truly bad defensive team during his time (12) and Wojo had 2 (12, 14). Definitely think returning playing experience has a major part, probably the majority of it (a strategic decision which falls on K) but want to give Wojo especially some credit for many years of great defense.

Or maybe I’m being an idiot and you all are already including the other coaches in your proclamations about K so the (+ staff) is implied.
Click to expand...

Wojo deserves no credit for our past defensive abilities. Dont you remember, he is too short to teach post defense.
 
dukedavidson13 said:
I was surprised I haven’t seen Collins or Wojo’s name anywhere in this discussion... I think the tendency to give K all or none of the credit for the good defenses seems misplaced.
Click to expand...

I think more likely some credit should go to Dawkins. Several of his injury-plagued Stanford teams still overachieved on defense (a top-20 year, top-40 year and top-50 year; offense was a different story), and he's done fantastically well at UCF (top-20 defense both years) , albeit aided by having a 7'5" center.

Our two best post-Dawkins defensive eams (2010 and 2013) were pretty damn good on defense, but also benefited from having multiple senior frontcourt guys who were great defenders -- which none of our other post-Dawkins teams could come close to.

With Dawkins, though, we were consistently top 10 regardless of personnel.
 
I thought our bump would be bigger given we held them to 67 points on 83 possessions and they aren’t a terrible offense (came in in the 110-115 range, so top third nationally).

Also, 83 possessions bumped us to a ranking in the 70s nationally in pace.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Chat users

  • No one is chatting at the moment.

Chat rooms

  • General chit-chat 0

Forum statistics

Threads
1,065
Messages
424,034
Members
624
Latest member
Bluegrass Blue Devil
Back
Top Bottom