[NU Sports] hoops and walker

[Jeff Beamsley]

Carmody's Princeton offense is built around a couple of fundamental ideas -
force the defense to play man to man, create an open shot, pull the defense
out from under the basket, use the backdoor cut to keep the defender honest,
and force the defense to play solid for the full thirty-five seconds.  So
the focus of a whole offensive set may be to get one open shot or get one
favorable matchup where if our guy beats their guy, he can drive to the
basket for an easy layup because there is no help.  

Though it isn't supposed to, this offense ultimately lives and dies on the
strength of its outside shooting.  You have to make the open outside shots
early enough in the game to force the defense to play man to man.  Then the
offense with all of it's picks and cuts can start scoring points on easy
drives to the basket or medium range jumpers.  If you can't make the open
outside shots, then the defense can afford to sit back in a zone protecting
the basket.  That makes it tough to get an offensive rebound. 

The teams that have played this offense well almost always have five players
on the floor who have an outside shot.  This is not an offense built around
a big guy in the post who touches the ball at least once in every offensive
sequence.  This is another reason why it is tough to get an offensive
rebound.  But I agree with earlier posters, if you don't box out, you won't
get any rebounds at all regardless of whether or not you are under the
basket.

The difference in those teams that don't play this offense is that they have
at least one or two individual players with sufficient athletic talent that
they can't be effectively guarded man to man.  The game in these
circumstances becomes one of matchups on the floor.  When a coach can depend
on one or two gifted players to force the defense to react by
double-teaming, they build an offense around taking advantage of those
reactions.  Northwestern has not been able to recruit the sort of talent
that allows Carmody this luxury. 

So what we see instead is a team that on a good day can beat pretty much
anyone in the conference because the offensive scheme works.  Good days are
defined by the outside shot falling early and maximum effort on defense.  On
a bad day, however, it can be pretty ugly.

Jeff
 



-----Original Message-----
From: nwu-sports-bounces at tssi.com [mailto:nwu-sports-bounces at tssi.com] On
Behalf Of Michael Jackson
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2006 9:03 AM
To: NU Sports List 
Subject: Re: [NU Sports] hoops and walker

Our BB team has a number of deficiencies that never seem to go away no
matter who is playing for us.  We are consistently a poor rebounding team.
Our offense is designed to get the open shot.  In the process, most of the
players are out of position for the rebound.  Our defense, a match-up 1-3-1
zone, should give us a better chance for the boards, but we don't block out
well.  If you always rely on only one shot each time down the court, our
shooting must be perfect for us to have a chance to win the tough games.
Our free throw shooting is also weak.  Too many close games are decided by
only a few points.  We need to get and make our free throws.  In the Penn St
game we only shot three free throws and made none I think.  PS made 20 out
of 26 if I'm not mistaken.  It is hard to win that way.  Our third major
fault is that our offense works better against a man-to-man defense than
against a zone.  Wisky played us man-to-man.  We were able to work the ball
and get either an open jumper or a back-door lay up.  If you will notice,
most of our tough losses are against teams that play a tough zone defense.
I don't understand why any team plays us man.  
 
BC has an outstanding class coming in next year.  What he does well is
develop the talent he gets as the year goes on.  Our teams always improve as
the season goes on.  If we can work on our deficiencies and improve, I see
no reason why we can't make the next step up to consistency.  We have come a
long way.  Many good coaches have failed at NU BB.  I think our best chance
is to allow BC a chance to build something here.  We seem to forget how
miserable NU was at football a few decades ago.  Our BB team is quite
competitive in the B10.  We just need to be more consistent.  Have faith.  
 
Mike
 
 
 
 
 
 
Penn State beat us because they forced us to be dependent on the 3-point

shot.  We couldn't get the ball inside against their zone.  When we can get
the ball inside, and make the three a part of our arsenal instead of

the whole thing, we are a much better team.
 
The other way to beat a zone is to reverse the ball and penetrate quickly.
I thought that we didn't reverse it enough, and when we tried we either
weren't crisp enough and they picked off the pass, or we hesitated too long
and missed the opportunity to drive against the zone.

  But it's a lot easier to see the openings from the camera-eye view, too.
 
-Michael
 
John Labbe wrote:
> 
> On Feb 26, 2006, at 6:57 PM, Brad Wilson wrote:
> 
>>  As
>> usual the team is totally dependent on the 3-point shot and has no 
>> inside game on offense (NU shot 3 free throws ALL GAME at Penn State 
>> Saturday) or defense.
>>
> 
> I don't know why there's the perception that we're "totally dependent 
> on the 3-point shot."  It often seems that way when we lose, like we 
> did against Penn State.
 
 
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