So I confess I didn’t watch the game. Had a sneaking suspicion something like that was coming. But based on Harrington’s tweets it sounds like Duke blitzed our ball screens, which if true I find interesting because they normally switch 5 ways. But Sparty blitzed and Wisconsin blitzed, so presumably Duke did the same because they saw how effective it was. If true I have just a few, mostly rhetorical questions:
1. Why are we so stymied by a pretty basic ball screens coverage. Going off memory here but I seem to remember the Warriors in their heyday just destroying blitzes flipping the ball to Draymond and letting him attack a 3 on 2. I am far from a basketball savant…but Will has excelled scoring in that short roll area and has also shown pretty good playmaking. Why don’t we try him in the Draymond role?
2. Why are we so vanilla on defense and never game plan for our opponent? As I said above, teams have figured out we can’t handle a blitz. And even Duke with their top rated defense was willing to adjust out of their normal switch everything defense to make us uncomfortable. Why do we play our same soft vanilla coverage against everyone and when we run up against a team like Sparty who excels in those shots and proceeds to make a bunch of them, essentially shrug and say “math.” And this has been going on for years. We have a defensive principle of not doubling/trapping the post, and we kept this same principle against TJD, who proceeded to score 40 on Dain and Coleman because they couldn’t guard him straight up but we refused to move away from our principles?
I realize teams can’t be chameleons. I.e we can’t all of a sudden play a zone against Sparty just because Indiana had some success with it. But I do think we could make some adjustments based on specific opponents.
Just frustrating looking at matchups before the game and seeing, oh they are really good at floaters, they will probably score on us all night, knowing that we will play right into their hands.
