That's how you play defense away from the paint. Arms out (or up BEFORE the shot goes off) to cut off passes and close gaps, but never holding your arms at your sides.
Our guards should watch St. Mary's play defense
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Our guys have a bad habit of not getting their hands up on defense. It’s pretty wild honestly. I’m constantly yelling, “get your damn hands up!!!!”
UK would light up st Mary's "good" defense.
Our guards help too much on the inside, setting themselves up to recover 10-12’ in an instant
We played pretty damn good defense at Tennessee, first game we have funneled everybody right to Ugo to block shots. It was a great change in gameplan IMO.
They definitely do, we are built more for steals but at UT we did a way way way better job, even blocked a couple jumpers.
Actually, it's our coach who should coach them to play that way. They shouldn't have to go watch other teams to see how to play.
Our defense is vastly improved the last several games. Iirc the last 8-10 games our defensive efficiency rating is really really good
What's the number for those games? Because our overall rating for the season still sits solidly in the 90s. The last 10 games are a third of the season. That's a pretty big chunk.
To be fair we light up just about everyone. Tennessee has a top 3 defense and we’re averaging 89 against them in 2 games.
Yeah it’s been around 20th from what I remember field of 68 saying, I would assume Tennessee helped.
Torvik has our defense ranked 86th since 2/5/24, which is our last ten games. He has our defense ranked 57th when looking at all games played against only Quad 1A opponents. He ranks our defense 43rd when looking only at Quad 1A games since 1/1/24. It's pretty clear that our defense is inconsistent, and we often play down/up to our opponent. As soon as you bring in the data for games played outside of Quad 1A our defensive efficiency metrics tank.
Of course it is. Never the players fault. Cal probably tells them, "wait until they shoot, then put your hands up." But more than likely, they just are not committed to staying locked in the whole 30 seconds on defense. They will lock in for a bit, get bored, then try for a steal. Cal has screamed until he is blue in the face trying to get them to guard. If you can't see that watching the games, you are not trying to see it. It takes away your Cal bashing angle and blaming him for the team not doing what he instructs them to do. I have stated it over and over in 50 other threads just like your post, you can coach it all you want, but the players have to execute on the floor. It is obvious they CAN play some defense, it is WILL they ? Basketball in general, these kids coming up are getting worse and worse every year on the defensive end, they just want to get up and down the floor, shoot, and get the ball back. Defense is boring to them. Same as rebounding, they have to WANT to or it will not matter what they are coached to do.
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I thought we did a much better job of on-ball defense for the Tennessee game, especially at the top of the key and early in the half court. Our problem was still rebounding though, and we got beat for a lot of 50/50 balls. Our 3 bigs don't have great hands for the ball, unlike Oscar who seemingly vacuumed everything up.
But that game gave me a lot of promise. Just have to be a smidge better on defense.. which for me is just effort and not making mistakes (like falling for pump fakes so much and fouling 3pt shooters).. you do that and our defense can easily be in the 40's and 30's from here on out, maybe higher.
But that game gave me a lot of promise. Just have to be a smidge better on defense.. which for me is just effort and not making mistakes (like falling for pump fakes so much and fouling 3pt shooters).. you do that and our defense can easily be in the 40's and 30's from here on out, maybe higher.
That’s incredible! I wonder what our defensive numbers are for the past 10 or so games. Trying to get a good barometer on what our defense ranks lately.
I don’t know exactly what it is. I’ve seen some people post some stuff. But it looked really good during the Auburn and Ole Miss games and has slowly been trending down again since. I mean we gave up 102 to Arkansas, 89 to Mississippi State and 77 to vanderbilt. Those are the 105th. 52nd and 204th ranked offenses by Kenpom.
Those are just bad to flat out abysmal defensive efforts even taking pace into consideration.
And honestly if you watch the auburn and ole miss games we still gave up a bunch of open jumpers, the other team just missed for a change.
What saved us against Mississippi State and Arkansas is we played really good defense for about 5 minutes in both games and that was enough.
I think we played much better defense against Tennessee. The near collapse at the end just made the game closer than it really was. They only had 69 points with about 2 and a half minutes left and then we turned it over 3 straight possessions.
Reed does this sometimes, but Reed also gets caught in no man’s land a lot because he goes for steals
Maybe, Maybe not. If so, then would you agree that the 7/8 to finish the season is on him ? I know your answer, but post it anyway, I am dying to read the exact same response on him for the 50th time.
He gets ALL the credit for losses / bad play, and ZERO for wins / good play. It is very odd that they CAN turn in good / great performances, then not so good. If they was not being coached, would they not ever play great ? How would they know what to do, where to be in the games they play great, IF they was not being coached ? They just step on the court and wing it ? Draw plays with markers on the court away from the coach ? IF they had never shown ANY ability, or won big games, I would agree, coaching is not there, but they have, and it has. It is they just haven't been consistent game in and game out, only when it is a BIG game, they tend to really show effort.
For me, defense is basically about outworking the other player and taking advantage of everything you have to get into position defensively. It's an energy thing. Our guys are more than athletic enough for this.
This team is capable on raw talent but either isn't stressed enough with the coaching staff or some other equally insane reason I can't fathom is to why they haven't done so most of this year.
When they play with fire & intensity, pace, poise and defensive grit - they can do it, they just got to put it all together - is when this team is at it's best.
This team is capable on raw talent but either isn't stressed enough with the coaching staff or some other equally insane reason I can't fathom is to why they haven't done so most of this year.
When they play with fire & intensity, pace, poise and defensive grit - they can do it, they just got to put it all together - is when this team is at it's best.
Yes they did. Better late than never, but it's a shame it took them until the last game of the regular season to play KY defense. Hopefully it won't be a one hit wonder.
In that case, UK would score 200 against our absolutely abysmal "Ole" open-gate defense
Over the last month our adjusted offensive efficiency is 5th
Our defense? 132nd
It hasn't gotten better. We've basically been doing the same thing we've always done all season long
Our defense? 132nd
It hasn't gotten better. We've basically been doing the same thing we've always done all season long
If anything, we've just accepted the fact that we're going to let teams hurry up and score so we can try to get a rebound and score more than them.
Yep. And even tho that's a dangerous way to play in these tournaments might have to accept the fact and move on.
Efficiency margin on Kenpom is basically the Vegas line. You could either do one of two things to increase that number. You could decrease your defense number or increase your offense number.
We aren't getting better on defense. Actually I would make the argument that instead of focusing on defense as Cal had mentioned, get better on offense. As good as we are, there's still room to get better there.
Our offense number is 123.2. Top offense is Purdue at 126.5. Get to that number or higher. Increasing the overall EM by that amount puts us close to the top 10 in KP and just on the outside of the 6-8 contending teams for a title. Get slightly better on defense as well and we are there.
Actually you're lumping me into a group with very black and white thinking. Trying to make it simple just makes it incorrect. There's not ever either total credit or total blame for a win or loss. He gets some of each for both. The players do too. But I try to avoid criticizing the players.
And as I've said before, my issue with Calipari isn't based on wins and losses or even overall success in the tournament. I dislike how he's running the program, what his priorities are, how he seems to no want to do the little things that other coaches do like game plan, make adjustments, etc, how he puts players over the the success of the program, how he seemingly doesn't or can't develop players very well over the long term, how he doesn't value or protect our traditions, etc. etc. etc.
Specific to this topic, it's his job to teach the players how to play basketball and to motivate them to do it. If he can't do both of those things, why is he a coach?
And basketball isn't that complicated of a game. These players have been playing it their whole lives and have had other coaches. They mostly know what to do. A GOOD coach does the little things to separate them from the other teams.
I hope so, it was nice to watch good offense and defense for once. Knecht had 40 but we forced him into some terrible shots.
Yeah and at the end I felt like Knecht tried to go into hero mode and do it all by himself and he just couldn't do it. When push came to shove, at the end we did defend him.
Remember that long 3 in the first half, he hit the right side of the backboard so hard we couldn’t grab the rebound lol.
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