Pregame: Illinois vs Mississippi Valley State, Sunday, November 25th, 1:00pm CT, BTN Plus
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I don’t know the defense like I know the offense, but the basic premise of pressure defense is that you will force enough turnovers and bad shots (that you rebound) to offset the layups and open 3s you give up.
It doesn’t matter if a team shoots 83 percent on layups if that comes on 5/6 shooting, or 80 percent on 3s if that comes from 4/5 shooting, throughout an entire game. Those are extreme numbers, but you can see the theory, you win points per possession because of all the forced turnovers and defensive rebounds, which equal lost possessions for the opponent.
We are currently living in the world where the turnovers don’t offset the offensive shooting percentage because they’re getting too many layups, hitting their good looks, or were not defensive rebounding they way we need too.
Rebounding might be expecting too much too soon, we might want to try some defense.
ChiefGritty
- Chicago, IL
Poor rotations is part of it, and lack of discipline and awareness to avoid fouling another, but lack of inherent rim protection and rebounding ability is probably the biggest part.
West Virginia gets blocks and one-and-done rebounds of misses forced by contests coming suddenly and from weird directions.
Illinois fouls and allows layups and second chance opportunities.
And for the record, Underwood's defense wasn't very good at OSU even when they made the system tweaks. And the defense was just okay and behind the offense in his first two years at SFA as well.
In a way the defense isn't meant to be efficient per se, it's meant as a vehicle for the way Underwood wants to play as a whole, generating fast break opportunities and not giving the opponent the opportunity to run offense and feel their way into the game. The offense and defense are part of the same whole, intended to be hard and frustrating to play against.
That has only very intermittently been the case at Illinois. Our opponents get rattled by the ball pressure at times, but you can see they've been coached to be patient and that there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if they keep moving the ball and stretching the defense, which is true because we can't protect the rim.
AJ hasn’t done anything to be pulled from the lineup
If Tev wants AJs starting spot, he should get on the floor and take it from him. That's how you build culture, not by handing things to people who haven't earned them.
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