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Message: [QUOTE="billsin01, post: 5224478, member: 837"] The only point I'll quibble with here is that -- to my eyes -- Carlos and JJ were the least of our problems defensively. What I mean by that is two things: 1) Freeman, Lampkin and even Davis really struggled in terms of knowing what to do when the guys they were guarding were setting screens (and LeMoyne had players moving all over, all night with multiple screens set on every single possession). Bell's guy was mostly coming around screens and Bell did a reasonable job of staying with him. Not great, not brutal. What's more, there were many times where Lampkin and Freeman effectively were an additional screen as they held up a teammate trying to navigate the traffic. 2) We have no guiding philosophy on defense behind 'pressure the guy with the ball'. Admittedly, if you have two outstanding defensive guards, that would really help. I'm not sure we do. But when your defense is so rudimentary, teams freely run their sets and it's going to lead to good shots. We disrupt nothing and you almost never see a syracuse player help a teammate by bumping a cutter, or moving a screener or anticipating a drive before it happens showing before the drive even starts. We just wait for the opponent to do whatever and then either react or, in far too many cases, not react at all. The best example of this is the two brush screens, as Devo was referring to them, at the end of the game where LeMoyne got called for moving screens. The calls were correct and they hurt as it was at a crucial time in the game. But LeMoyne had been running those all night. So you are guarding your guy and you think he's cutting to the ball, so you are hustling to follow him ... only he ends up just basically getting in the way of the defender a bit -- not a true screen, just something that appears to almost be incidental contact. All it really does is give the offensive player a step and an angle. This isn't the end of the world normally, except in this case the closest help defender is chasing his man in the wrong direction to help and, of course, we have no help coming from anywhere else. The result is often a layup or a good look at the basket. My point is -- that really isn't breakdown by either defender specifically -- it's something you need to practice and be prepared for and have a philosophy about as a head coach. Instead, we just generally continue to watch it happen. [/QUOTE]

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