Another overlooked factor in the win...

[RF2044]

But they COULD have still pressed. After we got a rebound he could have hounded the person who tried to bring the ball up. He chose not to do that. He generally doesn't do that, but it doesn't mean he couldn't.

Beyond token pressure, a press only works if you have time [like a dead ball or inbounds play] for your players to find their man and get on them. There's too much happening after a miss with player spacing, which is why teams generally elect to get back on D and not get beaten up court rather than trying to press.

 

[Orange87]

Yeah, I finally watched the entire 4 minutes of Pitino's pressed and got the context in which he was talking.

Originally I had thought he was telling the reporters to ask the players why they were pressing when they shouldn't have. That's what confused me. After watching it, he was admonishing the reporters for asking him why they weren't pressing more.

His answer - you can't press if you're not scoring - then made a lot more sense.

 

[CJSyr]

Beyond token pressure, a press only works if you have time [like a dead ball or inbounds play] for your players to find their man and get on them. There's too much happening after a miss with player spacing, which is why teams generally elect to get back on D and not get beaten up court rather than trying to press.

Exactly right. Pressing right after a rebound is extremely difficult unless you have incredibly athletic centers and forwards. During the rebound, most times, the forwards and center are in rebounding position, closest to the basket. Typically, a guard will press in the backcourt (at this point, the furthest away). Everyone is essentially out of position for a proper press. In addition, as RF said, you can't "tag" your guy in that situation--extremely difficult--which leads to leak-outs or guards having to defend a fast break at the rim.

 

[RF2044]

Interesting, because to me, defensive rebounding is definitely part of defense. You need to close out a defensive possession with a rebound to keep the other team from scoring. Obviously I wouldn't consider offensive rebounding a part of defense, but defense rebounding is just as much a part of defense as field goal defense, to me. What good is forcing a missed shot if you don't get the rebound?



This is true, but overall, the point of defense is to keep the other team from scoring points. (Well, also stuff like igniting your own team's offense with steals, etc). We were great at blocking shots last year, for instance, but I think some of that has to be tempered by the fact that we were so terrible rebounding the ball defensively. I don't think those two were unrelated; Fab frequently took himself out of rebounding position to go for blocks. So it's definitely a credit to the team this year that we can still get as many blocks as we do but still do decent work on the defensive glass.

There is one thing I remember thinking about last year or the year before, with regard to defensive efficiency, and I'm not sure if it could be tracked or not. But say you have two teams that have the same defensive efficiency; they each allow 1 point per possession or whatever. If there is one team that does that with say 15 steals per game, and another team that does it with 5 steals per game, wouldn't you consider the team with the more steals to be better? Reason I say that is because defense doesn't exist in a vacuum; you can turn defense into offense. So I'm assuming, for the sake of my argument, that the team with 15 steals is probably getting more transition opportunities and easy buckets than the team with the five steals. That doesn't really have much to do with what you said, but I have been thinking about it. The fact that we were 17th in defensive efficiency last year, but also second in blocks and 5th in steals, might mean that realistically our defense did more to help the team win than the 16th ranked defense, which was New Mexico.

I understand your point. My issue is with the interpretive analysis / conclusions people are reaching. Obviously, there are a lot of factors [including advanced defensive metrics] that go into defense beyond blocks and steals--points per possession, defensive efficiency, etc. But to look at that preponderance of data and conclude we are better defensively than we were last year--I think the answer is actually no, we're better rebounding than we were last year.

Again, I don't disagree with your point about how defensive rebounds contribute to stopping the possession. I just personally evaluate that data separately, and don't weigh rebounding as much in terms of defense. I don't have an issue with it being an evaluative criteria in assessing defense, but I think it is more accurate to say that we've improved on that dimension, but how do we rate [compared to last year] on the other input criteria?

 

[Knicks411]

Was gonna throw the stats in my post yesterday, but for whatever reason, I didn't. Here are some of the other stats Pomeroy tracks.

2 PT FG%: 40.8% this year (1oth in the country) vs 42.5% last year (14th in the country)
3 pt fg%: 28% this year (12th in the country) vs 31.5% last year (47th in the country)
effective fg% defense: 41.2% this year (5th in the country) vs 44.2% last year (15th in the country)
ft attempted per fg attempt: .32 this year (101st in the country) vs .31 last year (51st in the country)
TO%: 25% this year (14th in the country) vs 24.5% last year (1oth in the country)
steal% 14.8% this year (5th in the country) vs 13.9% last year (5th in the country)
block% 21.3% this year (second in the country) vs 19.4% last year (second in the country)

So if your main point is that main reason we rank higher overall defensively this year than last year is because we are rebounding better, I would agree. But overall, and with the caveat that we are comparing full season numbers for last year to partial season numbers this year, the defense is very competitive with last year in basically all phases of the game. They've done a little better with field goal %, and a shade worse at forcing TO.

 

[RF2044]

Was gonna throw the stats in my post yesterday, but for whatever reason, I didn't. Here are some of the other stats Pomeroy tracks.

2 PT FG%: 40.8% this year (1oth in the country) vs 42.5% last year (14th in the country)
3 pt fg%: 28% this year (12th in the country) vs 31.5% last year (47th in the country)
effective fg% defense: 41.2% this year (5th in the country) vs 44.2% last year (15th in the country)
ft attempted per fg attempt: .32 this year (101st in the country) vs .31 last year (51st in the country)
TO%: 25% this year (14th in the country) vs 24.5% last year (1oth in the country)
steal% 14.8% this year (5th in the country) vs 13.9% last year (5th in the country)
block% 21.3% this year (second in the country) vs 19.4% last year (second in the country)

So if your main point is that main reason we rank higher overall defensively this year than last year is because we are rebounding better, I would agree. But overall, and with the caveat that we are comparing full season numbers for last year to partial season numbers this year, the defense is very competitive with last year in basically all phases of the game. They've done a little better with field goal %, and a shade worse at forcing TO.

That's a good point [about last year's data being the whole season, versus this being season to date at the beginning of the BE conference schedule, pre-NCAA tournament].

Interesting data--thanks for engaging in the dialogue.