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  1. #61
    Join Date
    Mar 2007
    Location
    Mount Kisco, NY
    Quote Originally Posted by 94duke View Post
    Did you see Florida?
    AdjO - 2
    AdjD - 111

    111th !! They are more schizo than we are!
    What would be the over/under - 240? Halftime entertainment - Miles and Patrick Young in the Octagon? Boynton and Rivers switch uniforms at halftime to see what might have been?

  2. #62
    Thought I'd give my two cents on the state of Duke's defense this year...it's horrible compared to most of K's past teams. Guards can't stay in front of anybody. I've witnessed this scenario so often this year I'm sick of it: opposing guard breezes past his defender. Duke forward rotates over from his man to cut off guard penetration. Opposing guard dishes off to man open by Duke forward rotating over for a lay up or dunk. This leads to forwards racking up fouls. It's time to tinker with a zone or something. At the moment Maryland is penetrating any time they feel like it.

  3. #63
    Join Date
    Feb 2009
    Location
    Nashville
    Quote Originally Posted by blueduke59 View Post
    Thought I'd give my two cents on the state of Duke's defense this year...it's horrible compared to most of K's past teams. Guards can't stay in front of anybody. I've witnessed this scenario so often this year I'm sick of it: opposing guard breezes past his defender. Duke forward rotates over from his man to cut off guard penetration. Opposing guard dishes off to man open by Duke forward rotating over for a lay up or dunk. This leads to forwards racking up fouls. It's time to tinker with a zone or something. At the moment Maryland is penetrating any time they feel like it.
    Don't forget 6'11" Ryan Kelly rotating under the basket in the passive-charge position and crumpling to the floor at the slightest bit of contact.

  4. #64
    Join Date
    Jan 2010
    Location
    Durham, NC
    Quote Originally Posted by Greg_Newton View Post
    Don't forget 6'11" Ryan Kelly rotating under the basket in the passive-charge position and crumpling to the floor at the slightest bit of contact.
    I couldn't believe when he tried to take a charge on the 6 foot Stoglin. Taking the charge is a good move, but not when you are a foot taller than the guy and he's much quicker than you.

  5. #65

    Simple

    Our defensive problems are really very simple. We lack quickness and speed. You will never see quality
    defense in any sport without either of these properties.

    This is no personal reflection on our team, just a blunt reality. A short definition of the Duke basketball program
    is: HEART and DESIRE. We will always have that, therefore we will always strive to improve as a team in all
    levels of offense and defense.

    However, this year we lack what creates true championship teams: GREAT DEFENSE!

    Even with the greatest coach on the planet in any sport, you can't teach speed and quickness. You either
    have it or you don't. Unfortunately, this year, we don't.

    Just one man's opinion.

  6. #66
    If I were to analyze the defense in football terms, here is what I would say....you can run up the middle on them all night long....bad thing to say.....

  7. #67
    Join Date
    Jan 2009
    Location
    Boston, MA
    Quote Originally Posted by nobodybutDUKE View Post
    Our defensive problems are really very simple. We lack quickness and speed. You will never see quality
    defense in any sport without either of these properties.
    Not true. Curling.

    Boom.
    Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things. - Winston Churchill

    President of the "Nolan Smith Should Have His Jersey in The Rafters" Club

  8. #68
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Washington DC
    Quote Originally Posted by nobodybutDUKE View Post
    Our defensive problems are really very simple. We lack quickness and speed. You will never see quality
    defense in any sport without either of these properties.

    This is no personal reflection on our team, just a blunt reality. A short definition of the Duke basketball program
    is: HEART and DESIRE. We will always have that, therefore we will always strive to improve as a team in all
    levels of offense and defense.

    However, this year we lack what creates true championship teams: GREAT DEFENSE!

    Even with the greatest coach on the planet in any sport, you can't teach speed and quickness. You either
    have it or you don't. Unfortunately, this year, we don't.

    Just one man's opinion.
    Yeah, we lack the lateral quickness to be considered speedy. But I would not have described Scheyer as laterally quick or speedy either. Yet he had a lot of playing time under his belt and was really crafty, so he learned how to become a really good defender, both on and off the ball.

    One thing I've noticed is that our attention span as a team is pretty short. They can get fired up for short stretches but cannot sustain it. It's like ADD and it's bad for bringing the intensity you need to bring to make up for not being a great defensive team. I'm not sure how to make it more sustainable, but I think using Tyler in spurts when we look like we're losing intensity and focus is one method and switching to zone or full-court press for a possession or two is another method. I guess the analogy would be that if we dont have the 96 mph fastball, we need to change speeds to keep their hitters off balance. When an opponent gets in rhythm, we need to throw some changeups at them. Coach K was quick to insert Tyler in the 2nd half once Stoglin hit 3 fgs in a row, so he does seem to recognize this. But throwing some junk defenses out there could help too. Not sure if I expect us to do it though.

  9. #69
    Join Date
    Mar 2007
    Location
    Mount Kisco, NY
    K on defensive adjustments during the MD game:

    "On the improvement on his team's defense:
    "They came out really fast, they were really sharp executing. We're bigger than they are, but they're more athletic. They were really moving fast, you could tell they were very ready for the game and it showed up. They had good looks on their faces and we changed the way we were doing the ball screens after eight minutes, because we couldn't do what we wanted to do with their athleticism. So, we went to a little bit of a different way of defending the ball screen. That helped us, and we didn't get as strung out as much."

    I thought I noticed us going under the screen more, which obviously opens up 3 point shooting, but Stoglin often was determined to get to the hole despite us going under screens so maybe that helped us?

  10. #70
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Washington DC
    Quote Originally Posted by Billy Dat View Post
    K on defensive adjustments during the MD game:

    "On the improvement on his team's defense:
    "They came out really fast, they were really sharp executing. We're bigger than they are, but they're more athletic. They were really moving fast, you could tell they were very ready for the game and it showed up. They had good looks on their faces and we changed the way we were doing the ball screens after eight minutes, because we couldn't do what we wanted to do with their athleticism. So, we went to a little bit of a different way of defending the ball screen. That helped us, and we didn't get as strung out as much."

    I thought I noticed us going under the screen more, which obviously opens up 3 point shooting, but Stoglin often was determined to get to the hole despite us going under screens so maybe that helped us?
    Yeah, I noticed our guards going under the ball screens too. That was to prevent penetration. Bob Knight kept pointing out how well MD was attacking the basket early on, but that faded.

  11. #71
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    North Raleigh
    Quote Originally Posted by nobodybutDUKE View Post
    Our defensive problems are really very simple. We lack quickness and speed. You will never see quality defense in any sport without either of these properties.

    This is no personal reflection on our team, just a blunt reality. A short definition of the Duke basketball program
    is: HEART and DESIRE. We will always have that, therefore we will always strive to improve as a team in all
    levels of offense and defense.

    However, this year we lack what creates true championship teams: GREAT DEFENSE!

    Even with the greatest coach on the planet in any sport, you can't teach speed and quickness. You either
    have it or you don't. Unfortunately, this year, we don't.

    Just one man's opinion.
    I get the point. I understand and agree with your statement to a certain extent.
    More speed and quickness would probably help this group RIGHT NOW! (and maybe that's all that matters... the right now). It would certainly mask some problems.

    If you'll Indulge me for a moment...
    Lets look back at Dukes' past recipients for NABC Defensive Player of the Year

    Tommy Amaker
    Billy King
    Grant Hill
    Steve Wojciechowski
    Shane Battier
    Shelden Williams

    I'm not sure all these past players were both speedy AND quick to fantastic degrees.
    They understood the game. They grokked defensive principles and executed what the staff wanted. They had good insists and anticipation. They had a good seasoned cast of mature players around them a lot of the time.

    What this team is lacking most right now is experience.
    If it were possible for this team to exist in a vacuum for 1 more year their collective defensive effort would be much improved because they will have a superior understanding of the game and trust for one-another to be in their positions and make plays.

  12. #72
    Quote Originally Posted by nobodybutDUKE View Post
    Our defensive problems are really very simple. We lack quickness and speed.
    It's true we lack lateral quickness, i.e., we don't move our feet well enough in one-on-one D. But I think we have excellent north/south speed. Austin, Seth, Andre, Quinn, and Michael can all get up and down the court in a hurry. Mason and Miles are two of the fastest big men around, and even Ryan has sneaky speed on the fast break. We also have a lot of guys with quick hands on D. I wonder if we'd be better off with more full or three-quarter court pressing?

    Where I think we're currently slow is in mentally assessing and reacting to situations. You have to be able to do it without taking the time to think about it, and right now we don't appear to be there.

    Still, we played around 20 minutes of good D in both the Florida State and Maryland games, so maybe we're getting there.

  13. #73
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Los Angeles
    Quote Originally Posted by nobodybutDUKE View Post
    Our defensive problems are really very simple. We lack quickness and speed. You will never see quality
    defense in any sport without either of these properties.
    There are many counter-examples to this. Just to take one, our 2010 National Championship team starting 5. Nolan Smith was pretty quick. Lance Thomas, reasonably so. Singler, not so much. And Jon Scheyer and Zoubek were well below average for their positions in the quickness and speed departments. All in all, that was not a quick basketball team at all.

    Don't get me wrong. Quickness, I believe, is one of the most important single attributes for a player to have. But there are ways in basketball to make up for deficiencies in these areas. We did that exceedingly well down the stretch in 2010. Defensively, we have been erratic this year in our execution of the things you need to do to make up for a lack of quickness and speed.

    Quote Originally Posted by wilko View Post
    What this team is lacking most right now is experience.
    If it were possible for this team to exist in a vacuum for 1 more year their collective defensive effort would be much improved because they will have a superior understanding of the game and trust for one-another to be in their positions and make plays.
    We're starting two juniors, a 4th year junior, and a senior. Four upperclassmen. That's way more experience than a lot of elite teams start in this day and age. I don't agree that lack of experience is a significant factor in our defensive performance.

  14. #74
    Quote Originally Posted by tommy View Post
    We're starting two juniors, a 4th year junior, and a senior. Four upperclassmen. That's way more experience than a lot of elite teams start in this day and age. I don't agree that lack of experience is a significant factor in our defensive performance.
    Well, I'm going to side with Wilko a little bit. Yes, we have five upperclassmen (and four of them start), but here are the number of career starts for Duke that this five accumulated before this season:

    Seth: 19
    Mason: 32
    Ryan: 27
    Andre: 7
    Miles: 42

    If you didn't know how long this quintet had been at school, based on these numbers you might think they were four sophomores and a junior. And it's not just starts. Each of them has exactly one season in which they've played as many as 17 mpg for Duke (and it was last year for all of them).

  15. #75
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    North Raleigh
    Quote Originally Posted by tommy View Post
    Don't get me wrong. Quickness, I believe, is one of the most important single attributes for a player to have. But there are ways in basketball to make up for deficiencies in these areas. We did that exceedingly well down the stretch in 2010. Defensively, we have been erratic this year in our execution of the things you need to do to make up for a lack of quickness and speed.

    We're starting two juniors, a 4th year junior, and a senior. Four upperclassmen. That's way more experience than a lot of elite teams start in this day and age. I don't agree that lack of experience is a significant factor in our defensive performance.
    When I look at the roster, I see:
    AR - Fr.
    QC - Fr.
    TT - So.
    AD - Jr. but left HS a yr early
    SC - Jr. (w/ an extra transfer yr)

    Dukes D generally starts with pressure from the guards.
    And then the bigs either help or double depending on the opponent/match-up. Who among the guards is the Defensive stopper?

    I think AR is developing into that guy, he has the tools but has a ways to go.
    QC - Has looked good in spurts in a limited sample ...and then must work thru this most recent illness.
    TT - This kid fights. and fouls and reaches...
    AD - Has looked good in spurts but is inconsistent -even within a single game he is up and down..
    SC - he needs space to operate on both O and D and is having trouble finding it on both ends.

    That said, there are things the team can do to compensate and the more experienced players need to step up and do more consistently.

  16. #76
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Los Angeles
    Quote Originally Posted by Kedsy View Post
    It's true we lack lateral quickness, i.e., we don't move our feet well enough in one-on-one D. But I think we have excellent north/south speed. Austin, Seth, Andre, Quinn, and Michael can all get up and down the court in a hurry. Mason and Miles are two of the fastest big men around, and even Ryan has sneaky speed on the fast break. We also have a lot of guys with quick hands on D. I wonder if we'd be better off with more full or three-quarter court pressing?

    Where I think we're currently slow is in mentally assessing and reacting to situations. You have to be able to do it without taking the time to think about it, and right now we don't appear to be there.

    Still, we played around 20 minutes of good D in both the Florida State and Maryland games, so maybe we're getting there.
    Sneaky fast. Love that phrase.

    I agree that the mental component of our defensive effort is a significant factor in the level of our performance. That encompasses both focus and decisionmaking, as well as other things.

    But I'd be afraid of what would happen to this team if we try to become an aggressive, pressing squad. From a physical perspective, though we have a number of guys with quick hands, I don't think our guards have the lateral quickness to really harass dribblers really well. But more than that, a good pressing defense requires a lot of sound decisions on the part of the pressing team. When to trap, how to react to the action in front of you, how to react to the ball moving from one side to the other and the trap moving, what to do when the press is broken and the opponent now has an advantage, or at least a head of steam. Lots of different situations that the defensive players now have to master.

    It seems to me that we're having trouble enough making good decisions on help defense, reacting appropriately to ball and player movement, and those sorts of things even in the standard man-to-man (with switching where necessary) that we regularly play. To throw a whole lot more on our guys' plates at this point? Not sure how they'd handle it. And when you're pressing and get beaten, or make bad decisions, layups and dunks usually ensue. Not much margin for error.

    I do like SupaDave's suggestion about throwing in some other defenses for a few possessions here and there, not only to make our opponent react to them, but as a way to keep our own guys more intensely focused on what we're doing on defense. Pressing a little as part of that strategy might be OK, along with some zone, some junk, etc. But I think the main thing is for each guy to bring that focus and intensity and apply it to the best defense we have, and the D that K prefers, which is straight up, hard-nosed man-to-man.

  17. #77

    What we do have

    ...are great 3 point shooters on offense that are not the "big" guards other teams seem to have and that we have had in the past. What we do have are guys learning to play together, but without the "I am going to get this done no matter what" attitude that Singler and Nolan had. This last thing, more than any other thing (to me and to the man I watch the game with who knows more than I ever will) is the greatest deficiency. Well, how he put it was with a long ago quote from (he thinks) K who said, "every team needs a sonofa-----" We don't have a sonofa----- this year. We do have other things that I think we may take for granted in complaining about what we lack.

  18. #78
    Join Date
    Apr 2007
    There are many counter-examples to this. Just to take one, our 2010 National Championship team starting 5. Nolan Smith was pretty quick. Lance Thomas, reasonably so. Singler, not so much. And Jon Scheyer and Zoubek were well below average for their positions in the quickness and speed departments. All in all, that was not a quick basketball team at all.

    Don't get me wrong. Quickness, I believe, is one of the most important single attributes for a player to have. But there are ways in basketball to make up for deficiencies in these areas. We did that exceedingly well down the stretch in 2010. Defensively, we have been erratic this year in our execution of the things you need to do to make up for a lack of quickness and speed.
    That team had quickness where it mattered (1 and 3 positions), and had a decent shotblocker in Zoubs to back 'em up.
    Lance Thomas' defense was a huge (and underrated) part of Duke's championship run; he put the clamps on a lot of really good players.
    Our lack of quickness isn't so noticeable at the guard positions; it's the fact that we're both short and not that quick that makes it hard for
    us to be a good defensive team, especially at the 2 and 3 spots where we can't guard big, quick 2s or quick 3s. And, given the gap in the team's
    size, I don't see us fixing it.

  19. #79
    Join Date
    Jul 2008
    Location
    San Francisco
    Quote Originally Posted by hq2 View Post
    That team had quickness where it mattered (1 and 3 positions), and had a decent shotblocker in Zoubs to back 'em up.
    Lance Thomas' defense was a huge (and underrated) part of Duke's championship run; he put the clamps on a lot of really good players.
    Our lack of quickness isn't so noticeable at the guard positions; it's the fact that we're both short and not that quick that makes it hard for
    us to be a good defensive team, especially at the 2 and 3 spots where we can't guard big, quick 2s or quick 3s. And, given the gap in the team's
    size, I don't see us fixing it.
    I still maintain that mental lapses account for 6-10 of opponent's points each night and maybe even more. Cleaning up all of these errors is probably impossible, but cleaning up most of them means that we're giving up 4-6 fewer points per game, which makes a huge difference in both efficiency rankings and our own prospects on the court. Height on the perimeter is definitely an unsolvable issue, especially if Seth and Tyler/Quinn share the court a lot. But height and a relative lack of lateral quickness on the perimeter are not the only reasons the defense hasn't been up to par. I think everyone on the team would agree that they have yet to play a full 40 minutes of focused, intense defense. No, focus won't prevent tall guards from shooting over our perimeter. Nor will it stop quick guards from penetrating the defense. But focused defense will prevent fewer missed assignments, slow rotations, and preventable fouls. It would also mean more box-outs from our guards (something that has really been lacking), which would hopefully lead to fewer offensive rebounds. I don't think it's possible that the team wakes up and is suddenly a juggernaut on the defensive end. However, I DO think it's possible to see significant improvement on that end through improved execution and consistency. If every player makes a small improvement in one area on defense, the team will take a leap forward. I'm optimistic that the team WILL improve just a bit, which will make a big difference overall, especially with our offense being so strong.

  20. #80
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Raleigh, NC
    Quote Originally Posted by nobodybutDUKE View Post
    Our defensive problems are really very simple. We lack quickness and speed. You will never see quality
    defense in any sport without either of these properties.

    This is no personal reflection on our team, just a blunt reality. A short definition of the Duke basketball program
    is: HEART and DESIRE. We will always have that, therefore we will always strive to improve as a team in all
    levels of offense and defense.

    However, this year we lack what creates true championship teams: GREAT DEFENSE!

    Even with the greatest coach on the planet in any sport, you can't teach speed and quickness. You either
    have it or you don't. Unfortunately, this year, we don't.

    Just one man's opinion.
    Wisconsin must be blazing fast then.

    I wonder what Shane Battier's time in the 40 was? Must have been Usain Bolt-like.
    "Just be you. You is Enough."

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