Saul is almost exclusively a man-to-man defense guy. From what I have seen this year, the majority of our guys play terrible fundamental defense on the ball. I assume the players have played basketball for a number of years, and had a lot of coaches throughout their lives. How in the world are they unable to play basic, fundamental defense at this point in their careers? Surely they have been taught by a school or AAU coach how to defend their man. The technique is not that hard. Our team is physically able to play great defense.

It drives me nuts to watch our guys not move their feet and slide laterally, give up the baseline, not box out for a rebound and allow dribble penetration north and south in the half court. I hope Saul is able to get them to place a higher personal responsibility on stopping their man. Otherwise, we are in for a long season.

Right now it's tough to watch our perimeter players getting schooled every game by opposing guards. Ryan Taylor and Mike Laster are freshmen and they will get better. We aren't fighting through screens or rotating properly. And teams are killing us with dribble penetration. It will get better.

I've been thinking zone as well. You would think we surely can't get beat BOTH inside AND outside with zone.

Lets say you have guys on the college level who are poor defensive players. How does a college coaching staff teach defense to guys like that?

sit them in a defensive stance and do the same slides we teach 3rd graders. showing game film and refreshing ball you man and line of the ball principles. May not teach everyone as much as you need but at that level of college redefining the principles you hold as important will open eyes and give some understanding. Just like teaching a class in basketball principles you are gonna have kids learning a little bit of sumthin.

+1

Thanks borna. Last night on the radio show, I called in a question to Coach re: what methods do you use to teach defense? I didn't ask it, just had the guy who answered the phone ask the question...something was lost in the translation and the question ended up being, what do you do to stop offensive lulls? Not sure how that happened...

On defense, what I notice often is that players are about a half step slow in recognizing situations and then it's too late once they respond properly. I noticed that with Ryan Taylor vs. Bonnies. Their guards just torched us with their quickness and strength. Ryan would be about a half step slow responding and his man would get off a 13 foot jumper or else drive to the hoop. Is that where watching tape comes in re: helping players recognize situations?

It seems Nick K. had that problem early in his career but was much better with this as a junior and senior.

I know it is really early but last year I see the stats say we gave up 64.5-65.1 ppg (conference/overall). This year, so far, we are at 69.5. These are just the numbers, don't ask me what they mean.

PPG isn't a great metric to measure defense. But it doesn't taking any metrics to tell that we aren't a very good defensive team right now. That being said the metrics do support that statement. We are #322 in forcing turnovers and combine that with #181 in effective FG% and you get a recipe for a bad defensive team. Offensively we are forcing the tempo a bit more this year but I think that has more to do with a couple of guys chucking up shots early in the possession as opposed to us pushing the tempo. A lot of work to do for these guys to mesh and play better.