I had to sit with this one for a little bit.
This has been a uniquely rough stretch for the program during at least the recent CTB era. In the past, we’ve suffered some bad blow out losses to good teams, and we’ve also lost close contests to teams that weren’t very good; but we haven’t seen the regular wide margins in defeat against such inferior competition. Last year’s loss at Boston College comes closest, but that was one of only two double-digit losses all of that season (the other being by 10 to Duke in the ACC Tournament). And we had some real stretches of struggle last season, but were still competitive in most games while going through those struggles. Two years ago, the NIT season comes closest, where we were convincingly losing to Navy and did get blown out by both Clemson and NC State on top of some big margins to Houston, UNC, etc… but that was the single worst season since the very early stages of the CTB era, and still didn’t have a loss quite like losing to Notre Dame by 22 on the road. So, while I’d definitely argue that the highs have been higher this year than that one, there’s a reasonable case that the lows have been lower, at least so far. On the flip side, this also speaks to the standard of excellence that CTB has set for the team that when a team threatens to sink below that standard, it’s a little jarring on observation.
It’s been a tough balance to strike so far, trying to get the execution of both the offenses and defense up to the level to which we’re used to seeing and CTB demands, while taking serious short-term hits attempting to work through it. I think the thing that frustrates me is when I see beat folks or people who have covered the team for a while talk solely about the lack of experience, or talent, or toughness, on the team. They’re echoing that language from CTB, who has said those things in press conferences, but they’re also accepting them at full face value as just static truths that we have no control over other than patience and time. We need to remember that CTB is very intentional about controlling the narrative and, in addition, he’s also using that opportunity to reinforce his talking points to his team on working hard to master the system/challenge his guys, as he should.
The truth is that this team has two players on it who, more likely than not, will be drafted into the NBA next season. It has five more guys on top of that who were top 100 recruits, one player who was a minor conference’s rookie of the year, and one who was a minor conference’s co-player of the year. It might not be a perfectly honed/realized roster, and it might not have National Championship upside in this form, but there is talent on this team and we’ve done more with less in the past. We also sometimes talk about the lack of athleticism on the team but, on the flip side, I’d argue that’s because we’ve been opting to play some of our least athletic lineups in deference to some of the experience and perceived skill.
When it comes to experience, it’s true that we have less roster continuity than we have had previously. That being said, our point guard is a 4th year senior, two of our four transfers have four full seasons under their belts, the other two have at least one season of 33mpg as a starter, one of your freshmen is a red shirt, you have a sophomore starter who played over 20mpg in his freshman season and who also played within these same systems all through high school. Four of your guys who get regular time travelled to Italy together last year…. So, it’s not like the team is even really that inexperienced from a college basketball standpoint within the current transfer portal landscape, or that they’re even much more new to playing with each other than many other teams from a chemistry standpoint – it’s just that they’re less so than we’re used to having.
On top of that, even, we were playing our best basketball early in the season. Florida was a good win vs. a quality opponent on a neutral floor and we looked like a different team in that game, playing more free and with more intensity than we have recently. Texas A&M was a gritty win on our home floor. We held them to 47 points, their lowest total on the season. If experience and chemistry was solely the issue, you would expect a team to start out at its most clunky and play better over the span of the season. Instead, (along with the struggles of playing in true road games, which is certainly real) teams are adjusting to scouting us and we haven’t, yet, done a very good job of countering that. Because we’re not yet great at understanding running and adapting through all of our sets/systems, we’re playing right into the hands of what our opponents are prepared for – and we haven’t yet found a solution. That was especially evident in this game which I’ll focus on that in a bit.
It’s times like these where we need to look to our prospective HoF coach who does have a lot of experience, to make the adjustments that are needed both to continue to groom this team toward his long-term vision for execution while also making some short-term changes to better allow them to be more competitive now/make strides to make the NCAA Tournament. The vision can’t just be to play for long-term growth/chemistry and/or to play the guys most comfortable with the system now if the result is such a poor output now. CTB actually seemed to acknowledge as much at the end of his interview with John Freeman on Coach’s Corner when he said, “Hopefully I can do a better job of preparing them and giving them a simplistic plan, mindset…” so, even though we know how uncompromising he is with his system and what he demands of his players, there does seem to be an awareness that some tweaks are needed on his end to get there, at least right now.
We shouldn’t be talking about this like it’s already a re-building season and nothing can be done other than staying the course. I don’t think those were the expectations of fans or the players (or the coaching staff even if he said there will be growing pains) coming in, and we haven’t exhausted many options otherwise. There are all kinds of things we can try from a personnel standpoint (we saw the Big 3-5 lineup last week – it seemed like it could have been very helpful in this one but we never went to it) that we haven’t and, even more, there are plenty of Xs and Os issues that can be cleaned up that should improve our play on both sides of the ball (most of this piece is going to be Xs and Os issues). But, heck, one thing we won’t be talking about much in this piece is rebounding because that’s an issue that had plagued us throughout the season but that was much better in this game and has been continually improving over the past few! My point is just, there’s a ways to go with this group and it’s not a perfectly constructed roster, but I think we can be much better than we’ve been in both the short and long term and that should be our expectation of this group of players and the coaching staff.
Okay, all of that being said, let’s go ahead and dive into what happened against N.C. State on Saturday:
Post Defense
We’re going to talk about both post defense and our hedging/rotations quite a bit here. In some clips they’ll appear together so we can point out things from both, but there were different dynamics happening with both. Our hedge defense was a struggle to find something that worked despite making some adjustments throughout the game (perhaps not as aggressively as we could have). Our post defensive strategy was just a bit of a head-scratcher. CTB said in pressers that they have an area of the floor where if Burns got the ball, we’d go, and that they kept trying to make that clear and sometimes we’d go too early or sometimes we’d be hesitant when we went. On the surface, this makes sense, and would explain some of the traps that extended to the three-point line on Burns periodically throughout the game. What doesn’t make sense is how we weren’t able to get that clearly communicated, even after half time… but, more, why we rarely ever trapped the ball once it was in the post! It was a very strange execution where we were regularly running guys from across the floor to double Burns on the free throw line, despite the fact that the only way he’s going to hurt you from out there is by passing, but then he’d regularly get the ball in the post (or even Middlebrooks) and we’d leave them one-on-one. Let’s watch:
Early in the game, we played very good defense, holding N.C. State to 4 points until just after the 12:30 mark. This is the first play of the game and it results in a shotty violache! Notice how, early on, Burns has the ball just inside of the three-point line. Rohde is sagged off quite a bit to shade, but we don’t send anyone to double here. Burns takes a dribble and Rohde shades down a bit more, and he passes it out to Morsell on the wing, with Rodhe recovering. The ball whips around the outside but is mostly non-threatening. Notably, N.C. State didn’t set a ball screen until later in the play and, when they did, it was with Burns, so Buchanan didn’t have much of an issue recovering. He still probably lingers too long on the hedge – he doesn’t really stop the progress of the ball-carrier, but does angle him away from the basket with a pretty tame and non-threatening couple of dribbles, and McKneely gets back in the play quickly. Buchanan’s ability to catch up with Burns is also notable, although they probably could have found him with an early pass. Good on-ball defense by McKneely to deter the drive and contest the shot without fouling at the end.
This next one I think might have had something to do with the defensive approach because Burns backs Buchanan down from the three-point line. But, we didn’t need to get him out there. Dunn’s in great position to go when Burns gets close, and Rohde is also in good help side position where he can help on either Dennis Parker Jr. (#11) or Morsell (#14) if Dunn goes (with Beekman and McKneely shading around as well). Instead, Dunn kind of just lurks under the hoop but never goes to help, and Burns spins off of Buchanan using his strength for the layup.
As we’re about to see, sometimes Buchanan playing Burns straight-up was successful, and sometimes it wasn’t. Here’s an example of him not long later forcing a turnaround jumper that misses and our supporting defense does virtually the same thing. Dunn clears but remains under the hoop, and this time Buchanan forces a harder shot.
Now, as I mentioned previously, this wasn’t killing us at all at this point in the game. In fact, N.C. State’s point total remained at four for the next four minutes of the game from here (unfortunate that we didn’t build a bigger lead, which we’ll talk about later). The defense was playing really well to this point and I think you could (and I would) make a strong argument that this defensive strategy was effective enough to stick with it. It would have also been reasonable to send Dunn there when Burns got near the block, like with his layup two clips above or if he took another dribble or two in the clip directly above. Dunn could go as he prolonged his dribble and got close so there wasn’t a lot of ground to cover and likely we could have forced a pass out without having to over-commit too badly on rotations.
What we definitely didn’t need to do was this, which broke their long scoring drought in a big way:
Now, the big difference above is obviously that Jake Groves is in the game as opposed to Buchanan, so clearly the initial plan was to let Buchanan play straight-up and then aggressively double team to help Groves. The problem was… this is WAY too far away from the hoop to do so. Dunn leaves on the catch and if you pause at 12 seconds, Burns has turned sideways and is fully examining the court. Michael McConnell (#12) is wide-open in the corner and Beekman has to shade his own man on the dive to the hoop and then get out to the shooter (who he fouls). Beekman shouldn’t have fouled him, but it’s the concept of this play that dooms it from the beginning. Burns is a great passer. He’s not an outside shooter. In fact, the only way he’s going to hurt you from out there is if you do exactly this. It’s definitely possible that Dunn is miscalculating when to leave here and going too early… but it’s hard to accept that as the full explanation because we did not change our execution of this throughout the contest. We changed whether we were doubling, but didn’t change where we were doubling, which was bizarre.
Here’s Buchanan back in the game and, as a result, they play Burns straight-up. This time Burns works his way deep into the paint and hits a successful little hook shot, using his body to create space through Buchanan.
This is still only their 11th point of the game with under 10 to go and I’m completely fine living with this shot, to be honest. There was actually a much similar look later in the game and Buchanan learned, got a better contest on it, and forced a miss:
So, again, really not a ton of issue with Buchanan playing him straight up on these plays even through mixed results, but these possessions would have been good for a double team. When he’s making his move in the post, send Dunn directly to his left hand (or even occasionally maybe have him come from behind and try stealing it) and rotate accordingly. It’s how we’ve historically executed our doubles and the proximity of the post players coupled with less distance for the help side to cover should make it more effective.
Perhaps it was because of the success of the first play prior to the logo shot, which wasn’t the first time they ran it but came toward the end of the shot clock and caught Burns off guard. Buchanan was doing a good job fronting him for position (which I also like as an alternative to mix it up along with playing straight-up and sending a low double). The difference between this play and some of the others is that Buchanan is really fighting him for position throughout the entire process and Dunn is there right on the catch when his back is still turned. It forces a trap deeper in the corner (that he commits an offensive foul to get out of, honestly) and leads to CTB’s excitement re: the effort.
But that wasn’t a play to continue to replicate, nor could the nuances be replicated easily. Instead, we continued to do it and it started to create increasingly easy looks for them that they would often punish.
Here’s the next time they did it and this time when Dunn leaves to double, Burns sees it all the way and whips a pass cross-court to Morsell for the wide-open three point attempt. The shot misses, but the look was very good and all too easy.
Aside from doubling a non-outside shooting threat at the wing as being pretty unsound generally (especially one who passes so well and is surrounded by good shooters), it’s alarming that we saw the first and-1 make and then how easily this look came, that we didn’t make adjustments.
Instead, we continually tried to double Burns with the ball in that area. Here in this clip, below, Dunn doesn’t actually go all the way for the double (I believe this is the play CTB had in mind when he talks about hesitating). He moves as if he’s going to, which causes Beekman to sag down under Dunn’s man to help. Now, Beekman just gets completely hip checked/fouled here, which should have been called… but if he doesn’t have to get himself into help position this opportunity never comes. N.C. State could have set a simple pin-down screen without fouling and the result would have been a similar look. If Dunn just stays at home and then doubles if Burns gets closer, this play is far less likely to happen and certainly comes less easily.
When watching live, I expected them to clean this up during halftime. I imagined that either there was miscommunication on where to double or that the help defenders were just getting over-zealous on Burns and that we’d see our more typical double-teaming strategy in the second half.
But we started out the second half with this look, which led to Burns whipping the pass out to the wing who finds the wide-open man for the dunk at the bucket and-1. Again, this is a break down that just wasn’t necessary and the defense was solid across the board until Burns got the ball in his spot and we warped what we were doing to double it.
They did get and miss another open look out of this same situation again later. Fortunately (or not, depending on how you look at it), State pushed their advantage through ball screens more in the second half and Burns didn’t get the ball as often away from the bucket, but we didn’t really clean this up throughout the contest despite the results which is hard to understand how either they didn’t feel the need to adjust or that there was such a disconnect.
Hedging
This is one of the hardest elements of our defense especially for our bigs (especially our slower-footed bigs) to learn. There’s a laundry list of big men over the years who have struggled with the hard hedge; picking up fouls in the process and/or struggling to recover. N.C. State started utilizing it heavily over the course of the game and it became a consistently difficult thing for us to deal with both on the hedge and recovery and on the back end rotations. Unlike the Burns doubling, though, this was something that we attempted to tweak and the results still weren’t great. Last year, at times when they were struggling around this point in the season, actually, CTB had both BVP and Gardner flat or even drop hedge at times only to start to go away from it more as the season progressed. He did the same at points in this game, but without much improvement in result. I’m wondering if this is the area we’ll see the most obvious changes against Wake. Let’s take a look:
This is the first clip I’ve pulled, which comes with just over three minutes left to go in the first half – so you can see that this was something they started to lean on and then really gave us fits as the game progressed, and they started doing it by setting the screen pretty far away from the hoop to maximize recovery time. Now, the goal of the hard hedge, is to stop or severely impede the ball-handler while the initial defender recovers to him, and then recover to your initial man. If done right, it keeps the dribbler from getting down hill or making much progress toward the rim, while also harassing the ball and obscuring sight lines. Here Groves hedges but doesn’t really actually bother the dribbler much and there is a good amount of time where McKneely has let up on his recovery and is in fine defending position before Groves starts to recover. If you pause at four seconds into the clip, you see the ball on its way to O’Connell on the wing, Groves’s man, Ben Middlebrooks (#34) is alone by the logo and Groves is still several feet beyond the three-point line attempting to recover. This slow recovery puts a lot of tension on the back of the defense to protect the ball from getting to his man while still having their own responsibilities. I’d also like to see Beekman pinching down more here, lurking to intercept a pass to Middlebrooks more so that Rohde doesn’t have to sag as deep into the lane (and Reece’s recovery to his man on the wing would be easier because it’d be a farther pass from O’Connell. The ball goes from O’Connell to the corner and Rohde, who has to recover from inside of the paint because he’s holding O’Connell can’t get there in time to contest the three-point shot well enough.
It’s a tough look and not one for which there was a clean answer. It’s caused by Groves not hedging well enough, getting caught out too far, and having slow recovery speed, by Beekman not helping aggressively enough on O’Connell, and by Rohde not having fantastic close-out speed. Also by N.C. State having good shooters to punish the rotations.
This next look, is with Buchanan rather than Groves. Now, Blake throughout the season has been pretty solid at being active with his hands on the hedge and mobile in recovery. Other than Dunn, he’s probably our best big to do this regularly. But here, he doesn’t take enough of an angle to actually stop the ball handler and gets carried way too far and also too far out. Furthermore, Rohde tags Middlebrooks but lets him go and neither Dunn nor Beekman come off of their men enough to bother or deter this pass. If you pause at 8 seconds into the clip, Rohde has a good tag on Middlebrooks and Buchanan is literally still standing on the logo. Rohde should hold this longer because the dribbler is moving away and has no vision to his own man. But, if he lets him go, Dunn and Beekman need to pinch in here to deter the man closest to the rim getting a clean and easy bucket.
It’s like they went through the motions of what a standard rotation like this would look like but didn’t really approach it from an actual, “who is the most dangerous person open” perspective.
So, this was a problem as our guys were taking some sever angles on the hedges, not nailing them very effectively, and having a long way to recover. As an adjustment out of the half, we switched. Watch here as Burns sets the screen on Beekman and Buchanan goes flat on the hedge, levelling off right around the three point line with Rohde sagging effectively in the lane in case Burns rolled. The problem is, Buchanan doesn’t maintain depth and doesn’t anticipate DJ Horne (#0) keeping his dribble and keeping the pressure on. You can see that from 4 to 5 seconds in the clip, Buchanan goes from having his hips open and sliding with Horne to turning back like he’s going to retreat to Burns, perhaps expecting Horne to stop pressing the dribble. This puts him in backpedal mode, which keeps him from being in good position to retreat quickly enough with Horne. Seeing this, Dunn has to leave his man to actually stop the dribble, and the ball is kicked into the corner for the punishing three.
This is really just Buchanan not being as familiar/practiced with this drop-style and likely anticipating a rhythm of what he’s supposed to do instead of reading Horne and reacting to him.
We also tried having Groves change his approach and here, in the clip below, he straight drops out on the hedge. Beekman, however, gets caught on Middlebrooks as he rolls and can’t very quickly recover. Groves giving a lot of cushion and Beekman struggling to get back out to Horne allow him to pull up from three and sink the shot.
Still, with both of these clips I feel like there was merit, it was just the change in-game and the unfamiliarity that caused issues. Groves probably didn’t need to drop quite as deep and Beekman could have taken a sharper more urgent angle out from under Middlebrooks, but the idea was there and there was far less pressure put on the back end rotations. With just some subtle tweaking, just like with Buchanan carrying Horne longer, these could be a viable alternative if we’re getting exploited in the hard hedge.
Nevertheless, after these, we went back to it. I’m assuming that CTB decided if that wasn’t working then they were going to go back to doing it the preferred way, but I wish we’d have given it a few more reps. This is an attempted Spain screen by State in this one where Morsell is going to back screen for Burns… but Groves is so aggressive and far away that there’s no one there to actually screen so he just goes through the motions. Taine Murray hangs with Morsell and Isaac McKneely drops deep to impact the Burns roll, but it takes Groves so long to get back into the play from his hedge severity that it holds McKneely way too low. The skip pass goes to Jayden Taylor (#1) who drills the shot.
I should call out, this is actually a really nice defensive job by McKneely. He’s where he needs to be on Burns and recovers pretty quickly with a good contest on the shooter – he just has too far to go and it’s a nice shot. But, again, it’s a problem caused by how long it’s taking Groves to get back into this play.
It was really hard to understand why the rotation was so short in this game, especially for such a prolonged period of time once things really took a turn. It felt like Bond at the three and Gertrude in the game could have helped improve on some of the rotations on the back end. But, Leon Bond did not have a good game when he did play and his defense seemed downright sleepy. Perhaps, it had something to do with how long it took for him to come in and the game was already pretty far out of reach. That being said, you have to be ready when your number is called and he wasn’t in this one. Here he is at the four (still not a position I think he’s a good fit in ACC play) and he just gets caught flat-footed and too far away from his man to recover. The pass goes crisply into the corner and his contest can’t bother it.
The most unfortunate part about that clip is that the screen (which was also Spain) was actually defended fine and Beekman had gotten back into decent guarding position. Bond just helped too much and couldn’t get back (he also had some very uncharacteristically bad on-ball defense later on).
This last one, though, came much later in the game with both Elijah Gertrude and Jordan Minor on the floor along with Taine, Dunn, and McKneely. This was much better! Minor, who has really struggled at times this season hedging, does a better job than our other bigs of impeding the ball handler on his hedge and cutting off the angle, Taine does a good job tagging Middlebrooks firmly and Minor recovers with Dunn offering good support in the lane as well. Then N.C. State sets another ball screen, this time on Dunn closer to the hoop, and Minor simply shows and then retreats. McKneely and Gertrude exchange turns playing good on-ball defense and Gertrude finally gets a good contest on an airball that results in a shotty violache!
Certainly the urgency, up 20 points, might not be as high for State, but there were still over six minutes left in the game. This was just much better execution defensively across the board.
Minor gave the team pretty good lift off of the bench and CTB called him out for it on the post-game presser, but, again, I wouldn’t say this has been an area of strength for him historically so we’ll see how that progresses. It is possible if we’re not playing Bond at the 3 that Minor will start to get some of his minutes as ACC play wears on.
I was most disappointed in the seven man rotation, though. Not necessarily that they tried it out and went in that direction. I had a feeling we would see more Taine, for example, after the Louisville game. I did not expect that we’d skew so dramatically toward relying on him and not playing Gertrude at all until the game was no longer in doubt. You wouldn’t know it from his positioning in the clip above, but Taine struggled defensively in this one (as did Rohde) and, if he wasn’t providing offense, which he wasn’t, we have to be willing to get away from him much sooner and bring in our athleticism against a team that’s playing so athletically. Speaking of…
Taine’s Defense
I promised I’d keep more tabs on Taine’s defense if he got more playing time and it was pretty rough in this one, I thought, by (along with Rohde who started off playing pretty well on that side of the ball but that deteriorated, and Groves – many clips above) really deteriorating our speed/recovery on the defensive side of the ball. Here are a couple of the more visible examples:
This one, below, he starts out on the ball and then moves off on the wing. He lingers unnecessarily at the elbow and then his recovery angle isn’t deep enough and he doesn’t have the quickness to course correct. He gets beaten baseline, causing Buchanan to drop to help, allowing a pass back to Burns in the lane. Fortunately, Burns misses, but Taine relaxes, doesn’t get back into good rebounding position/drifts, has the ball deflected right past him, and then keeps carrying himself under the hoop, losing his angle so that the offensive rebounder has an easy put back. In three different ways, Murray takes himself out of the play in this one – recovery angle, drifting on the rebound, then floating farther under the hoop rather than cutting off the putback angle.
And this next one, below, is pretty self-evident but is him struggling to stick with his man in transition because of his lack of lateral mobility.
I completely understand wanting to give a longer run to Murray after his big game against Louisville or to work him a little more into what we’re doing. I mentioned being open to it in the last piece. But, if he’s playing defense like this, it’s hard to have him on the floor – especially if he’s not giving you offensive pop. I’m not saying we need to go away from him entirely or anything, but I also can’t see shortening our bench so significantly for him without being willing to change course when it’s not going well. Hopefully this game will change our course there. Gertrude is still a work in progress both with his offensive game and his defensive rotations – but he is also a good on-ball defender who can cover a lot of ground both getting around screens and help-side. He needs to be utilized as a viable answer.
Shot-Selection
Okay, now we get to focus on our offensive struggles… hooray? It’s interesting because, while we ran all of our offenses, we focused more on Flow in this game with the concept of putting Reece in ball screen situations and getting down hill… just like N.C. State did to us. The difference was, their big men were bigger threats to score around the rim and their players off of the ball were all threats to shoot from the outside. We’ll see in the next section how that, as well as poor movement off of the ball, really bogged everything down.
The first part of the game, however, saw us fail to push out a lead greater than six points despite the fact that our defense was functioning very well. The biggest issue wasn’t yet that things were bogging down, it’s that we were willing to settle for bad mid-range jumpers. N.C. State had a strategy to run us off of the three-point line and, when they did so, we were all to willing to pull up and shoot a deep two rather than force the action into the lane. Let’s take a look:
Here, we see Beekman use a ball screen from Buchanan in Flow, drawing all five players on N.C. State’s defense, really (and watch already how much help is dropping down from Dunn). He finds Rohde for the kick out who whips it up to McKneely. McKneely needs to shoot this look. He’s one of the best three-point shooters in college basketball and he’s got some air with a man scrambling to close-out. It’s more space than he normally gets, honestly. Instead, he drives past the man running at him, weaves past another, and then shoots a push shot at the rim, which misses. If he’s going to do this, he really needs to try to keep his dribble and get to that left hand to finish with a layup (or drop to Buchanan if Burns helps).
It’s settling both for passing up his specialty (the three) and then not being willing to keep pushing all the way to the basket. The space is there.
This next one is Rohde and he lets himself get run off of the three-point line as well. But, rather than pushing into the lane at all, he immediately fires off the deep two instead. There’s a lot of space in the middle of the paint there where he could have taken his dribble and, at worst, gotten a shot like McKneely did above (which is also much more of his bag).
We, especially McKneely and Rohde, just need to be more aggressive about attacking the rim; especially when players are biting on our shot fakes and N.C. State is effectively playing with a man down for the possession. Drive and dish or just get a higher quality shot.
Groves is our second-best outside shooter and here he passes up a quality look from outside to, ultimately, take a much harder and strongly contested shot in the mid-range. Beekman draws two after the pick and pop and passes out of his shot. Groves definitely has enough time and space to rip this one, but hesitates. I’d also like for us to stop compounding the issue of passing up good looks by settling for much worse ones with still over half of the shot clock left.
A good segue, if you pause the clip at 12 seconds, you’ll notice that Dunn’s man has left him entirely and is helping Middlebrooks on Groves. Dunn backs out entirely to the three point line and is all alone. He could have taken a kick out but, given that his shot hasn’t been threatening from there, I’d love for him to not back out so far, adjust his angle, and fill the space around the logo on a dive. If Groves were to see him that way and pick him out for a pass, he’d have the ball moving toward the rim with a good chance to score or get fouled.
Which brings us to…
Movement Without The Ball
Things on offense are really bogging down. The biggest issue, to me, is that players aren’t comfortable, don’t recognize the chance, or don’t feel they have the license to ad-lib when the opportunity presents itself. They’re so busy hitting their marks within the offense and going where they know they’re supposed to be, they aren’t reading the play around them and adapting to it. This speaks to that experience piece and is a very real element to it. It also allows teams who scout us well to cheat without fear of getting punished for doing so. But, honestly, more just cutting to the rim/diving and filling space would solve a lot.
Here’s a great first example out of Sides. Rohde gets the ball on the wing and Buchanan goes to set a ball screen for him. Rohde rejects it and drives baseline. Buchanan should follow/dive here since Rohde is taking two defenders. Dunn’s man is also sagging into the lane, but Blake could have a head of steam running at him in the restricted area OR a drop off to Dunn/kick out to McKneely depending on how the defense rotates. Instead, Buchanan turns and sets a screen for Beekman on Morsell, simply carrying out action within Sides. Rohde attempts to send that left-handed baseline pass out to McKneely but the angle is tough and almost carries him out of bounds, eventually causing the turnover.
Buchanan simply diving to the rim following the rejection would change the entire equation of this play.
Here we’re running the Inside Triangle offense and N.C. State, in a common counter if you’re comfortable with the matchups, is opting to switch most of the screening action. Additionally, they’re leaving DJ Burns under the hoop and allowing to take whichever of our players in the mix run through his area, keeping him from having to be in motion that much. Eventually, they harass our ball handlers up top and Beekman gets the ball. Dunn is able to back cut but that’s a hard pass for Beekman to trust or throw, especially with Morsell in decent helping position and Beekman is too far away from McKneely to get a quick pass to him. The result is a non-threatening drive and kick out to McKneely which forces him to create a step-back midrange shot as the shot clock winds down.
The solution here would have been to move the Inside Triangle to the Outside earlier in the possession and, force DJ Burns to defend ball screening actions away from the hoop. Clear out the back end early, don’t let him linger, and then dive and cut behind him. They did do this for Dunn at one point, here:
Below you can see some of the problems manifesting around Dunn but also with ball movement. We’re in Sides and N.C. State is over-playing/switching and trying to steal the pass to the wing at the top between McKneely and Dunn. They’re doing this both to deny McKneely the ball on the perimeter and because we haven’t shown the willingness to just post up Dunn in the game or historically. We run Rohde through and they switch/cheat over him as well. Meanwhile, our guys are pretty static with the ball – this would actually be a great opportunity for Dunn to cut up, take a pass at the elbow and hit Rohde on a backdoor cut to the rim – a play we’ve seen when teams are overplaying Sides in the past. Groves sets a pin down screen for Reece and flares to three-point line and is open at about 13 seconds. Passing the ball there and allowing for a shot would have been good. Instead, he resets and screens for Beekman again and rolls to the hoop. Now, notice, all of McKneely, Dunn, and Rohde are just positioned around the three-point line at this point. It’s by design to flare out here and allow for the two-man game with Reece and Groves, but it doesn’t work because Dunn’s man is full-on in the middle of the paint, he’s not worried about the three at all. Beekman whips it over to Dunn and pause at 17 seconds. His man STAYS on Groves in the lane. Morsell briefly fakes like he’s going to go out to contest Dunn, but instead just beelines to Rohde who Dunn passes to. They legitimately aren’t guarding Dunn on this play! Rohde passes back to him and he’s left to take and miss the open three.
That has to change. You can’t play offenses that end up going five wide if one of your players doesn’t have to be guarded at the three-point line and plays it stationary out there. Dunn either needs to be in the screening action around the paint, or needs to be willing to just drive at the basket when he gets the ball with so much space (or cut to the rim from there). Alternatively, he could start taking and making these shots more often (he did make one at the end of the game), but that seems like the least plausible fix here.
Watch how deep Morsell plays off of Dunn in the corner here. Buchanan would be wide-open on the dive otherwise and Burns is slow to recover. N.C. State’s compensation is just ignoring Dunn when he’s outside, making that pass not nearly as enticing (pause at 4 seconds). Beekman sees the issue and fires it to Dunn in the corner, but he just immediately resets to McKneely. They reset from Flow to Sides and Rohde attempts to probe the lane but gets it poked out by Beekman’s man from the point help.
If teams are playing us like this one of two things is going to have to happen – We’re either going to have to stop playing Flow with Buchanan and Dunn on the floor together (less than ideal), or, we’re going to have to intentionally have Dunn dive on these plays more. Instead of rolling all the way to the hoop, we could have Blake stop at the elbow, forcing Morsell to step up to play him/stop his downhill momentum. Dunn could cut in from the corner (I love when I get to write that) and take the pass from Buchanan for likely a dunk. These are the kinds of adaptations we’re going to need to prepare the team with to compensate for Dunn’s athleticism on the move toward the rim but also lack of shooting prowess/willingness.
Another look, again, Beekman and Buchanan running the clear-out version of Flow but when Beekman gets into the lane, Dunn’s man is there to stop the dribble and Dunn doesn’t shoot on the kick out. They attempt to reset through Sides, but Rohde isn’t physical enough creating space and the pass to him isn’t a good one.
I do like the idea, in general, of playing Flow especially when Buchanan is on the floor, but it is hard to navigate an offense designed to let Reece penetrate when the lane is cluttered from lack of respect of shooting. This has been a generally universal thing with increasing severity throughout the season. The scout is out – help dramatically off of Ryan Dunn on the perimeter and clog the lane. This needs to be accounted for and coached up with our offenses. Players need to be aware of where Dunn is and pinpoint where the help is likely coming from. Dunn needs to be an aggressive cutter and diver toward the basket, looking for opportunities and space to punish the help. He needs to be willing to put the ball on the floor and attack the rim when he has space. Everyone needs to be willing and aware enough to ad lib around these defensive looks and tendencies.
Another alternative is going back to that big lineup that was successful against Louisville. This allows you to play Blake (offers even more help/recovery on Burns defensively), puts Groves on the floor as your second-best shooter still, and, while it still has the same issues with Dunn, you have upgraded size to crash the offensive glass and cut to the rim.
Groves being in the game in general creates for more aware/heady plays often. Here is N.C. State over-playing the Sides wing passes again so Groves just dives from the high post and Beekman recognizes/finds him for an easy layup.
And it’s not like Dunn was never able to dive successfully throughout the entire game. Below you’ll see a play where Dunn’s man, again, cheats off of him and it foils a Beekman drive, but Dunn passes out to Rohde and follows it up with a back door cut past his aggressive defender that leads to free throws.
And here out of Inside Triangle, we see the ball eventually get to Reece on the wing with a baseline drive and rather than staying spotted up from the opposite wing, Dunn dives and finds a good opportunity at the rim.
We’ve been playing our normal offenses and hoping/expecting that our guys will find the plays like the three above with regularity but, more often, we’re finding things bogged down with an offense that struggles to find the right shot from the right player in the right spot, with guys seemingly unwilling or hesitant to go outside of the offensive patterns to take what the defense gives them. Yes, this is where the lack of experience comes in, but these are also points that we need to identify, point out, and instruct the team to attack with intention and regularity.
In Conclusion
It’s possible that the pieces are too raw or don’t fit well enough together to make a significant run at the ACC this year (or even at the NCAA Tournament) but there are a lot of adjustments that can be made to improve the short term – or to at least try some new things. Neither this team nor CTB are helpless in that regard and we’ve seen the team play better, especially when we weren’t being attacked defensively or offensively as intentionally as our opponents are doing now. It’s time for our own adjustments to combat those scouting reports. We cannot keep trying to do the same thing and solely improve through experience and repetition; we need to implement changes to better take advantage of our personnel and to exploit what our opponents are doing. We need to be comfortable being less polished in some ways in order benefit in others.
The big ones in the N.C. State game were: stop double-teaming the post away from the basket (but do mix in doing so near the basket), don’t hard hedge so far away from the basket and be flexible with hedge depths in general, play your athleticism earlier in games and don’t be afraid to lean into it with bigger rotations – lean more into defense than the offense especially on the road, especially if your offensive players like Rohde and Murray aren’t giving you much, and don’t just run the same three offenses in a vacuum – teach to our individual personnel and add intentional points of emphasis taking into account how defenses are playing/cheating off of us. Specifically, have a very intentional game plan for when teams cheat off of Dunn on the perimeter, because we know it’s coming now and there are lots of alternatives to what we have been doing.
Basically, a lot of our premises about how to utilize this team need to evolve, at least in the short term, and we need to be willing to try different things because there might be different paths to what “good” looks like on this roster. Certainly, within games when they start to slip, we need to be more willing to deviate from a game plan that isn’t working.
Looking forward to seeing what (hopeful) changes we’ve made vs. Wake Forest on Saturday.
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