Syracuse basketball’s prep for Italy includes new offensive plays, man-to-man experiment

[djcon57]

Will believe it when I see it in a game

 

[reedny]

We will try m2m...

we'll get beat by an Italian Select team made up of 25-30 year olds who have been playing together for years ..

our fan base will panic...

and we will never speak of m2m ever again.

. . . even worse they'll be coached by Steve Evans.

 

[syrBossHogg]

More transition on offense would be good start, we should have the guards/forwards to do it this year

 

[SUFan44]

This is all well and good, but when push comes to shove, we will be playing zone 75-85% of the time with the press sprinkled in.

Also, while I agree that the offensive players we have had the past 4-5 years have been severely limited, I also don’t think the coaching staff should be given a pass on the offenses they ran.

And the reason I say that is you can have bad players who run offense crisp, run off screens the proper way, set up cuts the proper way, and all of the little things that you would think a Division I basketball player should know coming into college but may not these days (AAU Generation). The staff absolutely is at fault for how the offenses were run, and the reliance on one player to dribble drive and create.

I think the players we have playing next year are going to be better basketball players so our offense should be better by default. Without Howard, especially. But it would be nice to see us get a backdoor layup multiple times in a game against top competition.

 

[billsin01]

Have a feeling we're going to see an offense that's heavily dependent on the three. Going to be a lot of driving and dishing.

So JB is showing change that fans have craved just a little of. Not a sea change but atleast a willingness to adapt.
Fans are happy but let’s take a dump on the optimistic news.

Nobody(minus the fans who aren’t really fans) is going to give a chit if we lose every single one of these games by 40. Just like nobody gives a chit how their baseball team does in spring training or how their NFL teams do in preseason.

All that will matter is how the new players/plays/defenses looks.
JB showing he will atleast experiment is a good thing but let’s just pull the passive aggressive bullchit out.

Our program has been the most stagnant and easy to prepare for program the last 10’years but let’s just ignore that.
People complaining about the offense and 100% zone minus press aren’t making complaints up. They have been a problem.
Our offense has been stagnant seeing JB put new plays in is excellent news.
Seeing JB realize to atleast have the m2m in his back pocket he needs to teach it and is actually doing that is good news.

Whenever I see anybody complain about plays, I tune it out. The offense was scaled back to the limitations of the players these past several years.

Installing a few more offensive plays wouldn't have magically alleviated what was ailing -- the "problem" wasn't the offense, that was a symptom of the actual problems... and there were several [i.e., lack of true lead guard, no inside game to create balance / floor spacing, subpar passing, inability to create anything off of the dribble, all of which made us one-dimensional].

So, bickering about what defense works aside, some interesting things in Donna's article and some valid and interesting points in these posts.

What I think a lot of people are missing -- or at least isn't being pointed out -- are some of the changes in the game (offensively and defensively) the past few years and some of the changes in our roster makeup this season compared to ... I don't know when. It's a really unique roster.

But, to me, a couple interesting factors here that may lead us to change a bit of how we play:

• Teams are putting more offensive threats on the floor today than even five years ago and certainly moreso than 15 or 20 years ago. The reason for the spike in three-pointers attempted (it is a rate that has gone up every year for five years) is because more kids can shoot the three. This doesn't mean the zone doesn't work as a primary or even sole defensive system, but it does mean everyone has to account for more threats and more outside shooting. In short, every team is trying to figure out how to cover more real estate on the court and, therefore, I would imagine most teams are looking to at least tweak how they play defense.
  
  
• Man-to-man defense is now really heavy on zone principals. Teams switch everything and make every effort to play more positionless defense (I think the term 'positionless' is overblown since only the Giannises and Kawhis of the world can guard 5 positions, but the idea that guys can at least roughly defend more than one position is key). JB exploring playing some man today is different than it would have been 5 or 10 years ago. It's not that switches didn't happen, but teams routinely play man defenses that look far more like zones than true man. Buffalo is a great example -- they get after the ball and play tough man, but the hedging, cheating, early slides and slanting the defense to the ball side are all every bit as much zone principals as they are man.
  
  
• Our roster is really weird. Not sure this is a great thing but I'm also not sure it's entirely by accident. Sure, we've had plenty of recruiting misses and I'd never argue we're intentionally avoiding signing top 50 players, but we went hard after Girard despite the fact that he doesn't really 'fit' what we do. We didn't really bother going after a 5th-year big (might come back to bite us) and instead took a couple bigs who seem to play more on the perimeter. We took Hughes as a traditional transfer despite the fact that he's not a 2 but really doesn't exactly fit as a 3. We took Girard and Goodine -- neither of whom is a blow-by type guard -- despite the fact that Carey is really our only quick twitch type guy. We have a ton of guards in general. It's just a strange roster that would lead me to believe that at least offensively we're looking to load up on shooting and are potentially looking to play smaller at times (maybe some three-guard lineups?).
  
  
• Our offense has been downright brutal in four of the past five seasons. JB may be a dinosaur and maybe the game has passed him by -- I don't know -- but he knows as much as everyone else that we have to be better offensively. Looking to expand what we do offensively is almost a given, IMO, particularly with Battle and Howard gone.

So what do I make of the article? I think our offense will look a lot different this year. Think we'll see more pace and more ball movement. I could see us shooting a ton of threes (for better or for worse) and, as was noted in one of the posts above, I think drive and kick with Carey will be really important, particularly since we really will be likely to have five perimeter players on the floor at once most of the time.

Defensively, I don't see us abandoning the zone or playing much man, but I don't think we can sit in our general zone and just hope teams miss the open corner threes they get. I think we're making an effort to try and get more athletic at center even if it costs us on the glass (which it will, and that could be the major issue). I also wouldn't be surprised at all to see some man and, more likely, I wouldn't be surprised to see us playing a zone that looks a little funky. A little more pressure, a little more aggressive against the high ball-screen.

The interesting thing is if we play a very zone-ish man-to-man, if we end up leaning on it a bit more as the season goes along. Should be a very interesting team to watch play.

 

[cuseattle]

^ Our roster is really weird. I'm looking forward to it, but I have no idea what to expect.

 

[OttoinGrotto]

Also, while I agree that the offensive players we have had the past 4-5 years have been severely limited, I also don’t think the coaching staff should be given a pass on the offenses they ran.

And the reason I say that is you can have bad players who run offense crisp, run off screens the proper way, set up cuts the proper way, and all of the little things that you would think a Division I basketball player should know coming into college but may not these days (AAU Generation). The staff absolutely is at fault for how the offenses were run, and the reliance on one player to dribble drive and create.

This is where I'm at. I see a lot of sloppiness in how we play on the offensive end that I don't see from every other team. We play a lazy offense and I don't believe in the recent past it has helped our players enough.

 

[Cusefan0307]

Some of our better players the last few years have the worst feel for the game I've ever seen. Battle and Brissett never passed when going to the basket and were basically black holes. I hope some of the new guys have the ability to pass and shoot.

 

[Zelda Zonk]

The headline says "new plays," plural. In the article, Boeheim says it's only one new play. One. I guess we're at maximum capacity.

 

[OttoinGrotto]

The headline says "new plays," plural. In the article, Boeheim says it's only one new play. One. I guess we're at maximum capacity.

You know... I'll take it.

 

[721Comstock]

You know... I'll take it.

Yeah, that's like... DOUBLE the # of plays we used to run!

 

[Oakland]

Is there no sarcasm font for titles?

Boeheim: SU's Italy prep includes new plays, man D experiment

The Orange will play four games in its August tour of Italy.

www.syracuse.com

 

[tbonezone]

JB will learn some real authentic italian recipes and come back and spoon feed us chef boyardee zone til we puke. who needs manicotti ??? we play zoneacotti !!!!

 

[kcsu]

JB is still learning and evolving next thing he'll be banging out emails, ditching the notebook, and tweeting like a millennial. But when its all said and done there will remain one constant.
JIMMY DONT MAN

 

[007]

We've seen preseason and pre-start of league play "experimentation" throughout JB's career.

And then we've seen what JB does once league play starts or when we play a ranked OoC team. That's the stuff to pay attention to.

 

[FrancoPizza]

So JB is showing change that fans have craved just a little of. Not a sea change but atleast a willingness to adapt.

JB showing a legitimate willingness to experiment with m2m would be considered a sign of the impending apocalypse. I'm not talking about a Lemonyne redux where he's just looking to justify why they can't play it. Legitimately giving it a fair chance and working hard at making it a secondary option is something that a generation of fans haven't seen. If there are still practice reports of man in October at the Melo Center and he hires Slick Rick as a m2m defensive coordinator, then I'll start to believe something is up. Until then this is just lip service.

 

[Cappy3]

I really think the reason he will allow some man defense has to do with practice time. We get only ten practices before the trip. It’s highly unlikely all the new faces will be up to speed on the zone in that amount of time, in addition to learning the offense. They all played man in high school, so letting them play some man allows more time to work on the offense. But in the regular season, after the normal amount of practice time, don’t expect to see much man. I’ll be totally shocked if we play even one minute of man vs Virginia.