MBB: Pre-season 2014-15 Thread

[dragoneye776]

Coach K is teaching his players zone?

(In the article linked from the front page)
http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/10/...=/99/103/&rh=1

Perhaps it is just to help players play better offense against the zone. Perhaps Coach K will go to zone once in a while to confuse the opposing offense.

[Kedsy]

Perhaps it is just to help players play better offense against the zone. Perhaps Coach K will go to zone once in a while to confuse the opposing offense.

My guess is it is the former, but I suppose you never know.

[CDu]

Coach K is teaching his players zone?

(In the article linked from the front page)
http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/10/...=/99/103/&rh=1

Perhaps it is just to help players play better offense against the zone. Perhaps Coach K will go to zone once in a while to confuse the opposing offense.

My guess is it is the former, but I suppose you never know.

I mean, we've played a zone (very) occasionally in the past. As such, I'm sure we've occasionally practiced a zone defense at one time or another. So I would say that both the former and the latter are reasonable explanations: we are practicing the zone to get used to facing it, and we may (on rare occasions) throw a zone out there briefly to throw teams off.

I think the more interesting part of the article is the idea that the coaching staff is simplifying the defensive principles. This past summer was one of the first times that I can remember Coach K talking about rethinking everything, and it sounds like one of the results of that thought is that the defensive concepts Coach K has historically relied on is too complex for a young team to master. It kind of makes sense: when Duke was running a junior/senior-laden team out there, Coach K could employ advanced defensive principles. By virtue of having had 2-3 years of preparation, his players had the experience to make it work.

But as the landscape of college basketball has changed and the best players are leaving sooner and sooner, employing such a complex strategy requires that you must choose between talented recruits and shoddier defense or pray that you get lucky with incredibly advanced freshmen or pray that you get lucky with guys staying longer than expected. It seems that until this past summer, Coach had stuck to his guns. But the result was an often shaky/poor defense, and that was perhaps in no small part due to the lack of experience on the floor.

The following comment by Coach K really suggests he gets this:

The level of play will probably never like it has been in the past. How could it? But as long as it’s better than the level of play than the person you’re playing against, that’s our goal.

It really sounds like the staff may be adapting to the challenge of the ever-changing landscape of the college game. Hopefully their new approach will result in much better defensive results this year in spite of being an even younger team than last year's group.