Zone Defense: Details - Louisville

After their last night's win and therefore Pitino's second Championship, it's a good moment to take a look at Louisville's zone defense, one of their main weapons during the NCAA tournament. 

We often talk about how a good zone defense should look like a man to man defense. One of the keys to achieve that goal would be to develop aggressive help side activity. 

Watching this clip we see how Louisville defense moves towards the ball. The second defender of the top line goes beyond the "rim to rim" line and takes care of the big guy in high post (he actually steals the pass) while the help side defender takes care of the other two duke's players. 

They are aggressive on the ball, they colapse ball side, and they fill the zone defense's gaps.

P&R spacing: VCU

It seems like years since we watched the NCAA Final Four, and everyone talks about UConn and Butler. At least in my country, not many coaches or fans appear to notice how well Virginia Commonwealth U. played during the March Madness...

I'd like to show you something I liked watching their games. It's their pick and roll game, and how they find the wide open guy, how they move the ball, how they have the right spacing on the floor.

In the video we see two P&R situations and how they manage to beat Butler's defensive rotations (there were many more, but these two will be fine to let you see them)

They run the ball screen, start moving the ball, and more important, they start moving without the ball. At the end, they manage to create a 2x1 situation and the defender must decide which player to defend. Then they give an extra pass and find the easy shot. As we can see in the first play, the ballhandler gives the pass to the wing, while the screener rolls and the other big pops. On the opposite side, another player fills the corner. Butler start their rotations but they arrive late and can't contest that shot from the corner.

Again in the second clip, they move the defense, and make one guy hesitate with a 2x1 situation, not allowing Butler to bother the shooter in the corner. Good spacing, sharing the ball and hitting the three.

Take a look...

NCAA: Inside Players – Luke Harangody

A player with so many honors (All-BIG EAST Conference first team for the second straight season. USBWA First Team…) should have a good professional career...

As we can read in the Fighting Irish web site, "he has scored in double-figures in all but two games this season. Overall this season, Harangody has reached double figures in 28 of 30 games. He has posted 21 double-doubles this season… Harangody has reached the 30-point plateau on five occasions during the '08-'09 campaign. His high-water mark was a 32-point effort against Louisville. He has grabbed 15 or more rebounds 10 times during the season, including a season-best 17 boards on three occasions. After averaging 25.2 points and 12.8 rebounds in 18 BIG EAST games this season, Harangody became the first player in league history to lead the conference in scoring in back-to-back seasons. As a sophomore in 2007-08, he averaged 23.3 points and 11.3 rebounds in league play en route to being named the BIG EAST Player of the Year. In his three-year BIG EAST career, Harangody has scored 1,031 points (19.9 ppg) in 52 league contests. Only three other players in BIG EAST history - Ray Allen (Connecticut), Richard Hamilton (Connecticut) and Pat Garrity (Notre Dame) - have scored more than 1,000 points in three seasons."

He’s actually playing the NIT tournament with his Notre Dame Fighting Irish, and they are already one step from the Final Four.

But although he’s so well considered in the NCAA basketball, not many people think Harangody's NBA future is clear. Maybe being an undersized center with limited athleticism brings doubts over him (take a look at my old friend Ryan Mendez’s opinion)

Can he play against NBA players? Can he develop his game to achieve a role in The League? As I won’t have to decide about those questions, we can just watch his video and comment about it.

The first thing I like about him is that he’s got a lot of ways to score. Hooks (take a look at his pictures when he was a kid… and you’ll know where that hook comes from), mid range shots, one on one from the high post, fade away jumpers, threes, makes over 75% of his free throws… and although his style is a little bit unorthodox is clearly effective.

His Basketball IQ is really high. He knows how to play without the ball, he plays well against helps, and his positioning on the court is great. That’s not very common in young players nowadays… and he can beat more athletic players that way.

He’s hard on defense, I’ve watched him playing against bigger, stronger and faster players, and he beats them anyway…

But, will he be able to do it at the next level? I think so, but in case he can’t, there would be a place in my teams for him…

NCAA: Inside Players - Greg Monroe

As my twitter friends already know, I’ve been watching some young inside players during the last week (BTW you can follow me on twitter). I’m really interested in the development of inside players, and I like to watch those called to be NBA stars, to find out the way they improve during their NCAA career.

The first player I’m going to show you is Georgetown’s Greg Monroe. A very good Spanish blogger, el “Profe” Paniagua talked about him some weeks ago, and I started analyzing some of his games.

Monroe is a freshman, and according to NBADraft he will stay one more year in college before jumping to the NBA.

It could be a wise decision, in order to gain weight and improve his defense against stronger players, maybe his main weakness (take a look at the first images). He’s a good blocker and rebounder (both on defense and offense). He has long arms and big hands and he knows how to use them to steal passes and deflect many balls (as we can see in the video).

On the other end of the floor, he has something really important for a player his size, he’s a good free throw shooter and forgetting about percentages (near 70%), his free throw’s shooting technique is quite good. He’s a great player from the high post, he can shot from that range but what he likes the most is to drive to the basket to finish. He has some moves near the basket and is developing a good right hand hook (he’s left handed). Finally, watch him running the break…

He’s been called “the best freshman prospect in America” by Draftexpress.com so he’s a player to keep an eye (or two) on.