NCAA tournament 2011 — running thread

You never win with extremes. You win with a combination of the two.

John Thompson always played amazing defense at Gtown, but they didn't win shit until they got a shooter like Reggie Williams and they never won shit without him.

 

I hate the tired "defense wins championships" cliche. Scoring more points than your opponents wins championships. Defense certainly helps, but without scoring you aren't going to win anything. Defense puts you into a position to where you can score enough points to win championships.

 

Except for several years at LMU, Westhead has been generally unsuccessful as a college basketball coach, and was a spectacular failure in the NBA with the Bulls and Nuggets.

 

I think you mean the Lakers and the Nuggets.

An up-tempo style could work if three-point shots were a big part of the equation. I think LMU had that going.

 

No, he's talking about the

No, he means the Bulls, where Westhead failed in a most ugly manner during the 82-83 season.

But Westhead did not run his full throttle run n gun "system" at either LA or Chicago. LMU was the first time he tried it and the 90-91 Nuggets were the only NBA team to really try it.

Truth is, the Westhead system has only worked in men's basketball for about a 3 year period at LMU from around 88-90, when he had a really special group of players and it was so different it took opposing coaches by surprise. But eventually they figured out how to take that gimmick apart. It failed miserably when Westhead tried it in the NBA at Denver, and it failed again when he tried to bring it back to college basketball at George Mason.

 

The system is a lot of fun, but it requires parts that are pretty unique and hard to replace. Forwards who will put the ball on the floor and attack like a point guard, centers who are not only good 3-point shooters but are willing to be strictly 3-point shooters and inbounders. You don't just bounce around finding the same kind of parts to plug in.

And you don't play defense. You really don't. I used to crack up at how, when the opponent drove to the rim, instead of challenging the shot or taking a charge, the LMU center would back up under the goal so he could catch the ball coming through the net, step back and quickly inbound the ball almost in one motion. Talk about NO defense.

And we all know, defense wins championships. ;-)

 

Or, to be more accurate, you only play defense on one half of the court--the front half. Those Westhead teams would full court press like holy hell in the forecourt--they certainly played defense there--but, once you got the ball past half court you'd have an open lane to the hoop nearly every damn time.

The idea is that it would so exhaust your opponent from all the running, that he'd start making so many dumb forecourt turnovers/mistakes, that it would make up for all the free layups you were giving him at the other end. And, amazingly enough, for three years it actually worked. But it was ugly when it didn't, great press breaking point guards turned games against Westhead's teams into glorified layup drills.

I'll give Westhead credit though, it took balls of steel to actually try such an extreme system, and it was damn fun to watch for a few years, but it was always destined to fail in the long term. At some point you have to actually defend the shooter and not just the dribbler, and great ballhandling point guards will eat that shit up every day.

There's enough college teams with questionable ballhandling and conditioning that it might still work at a lower mid-major type program. But doubtful ever in a major conference. And the idea that it could ever work in the NBA against point guards like Paul, Nash, Williams, Rose, etc. is just ludicrous (as was proven the one time it was tried in the League, the 90-91 Nuggets gave up an astonishing 130.8 points per game).

 

I think they get confused when the play combines those two techniques. Those are usually the brunt of the arguments, when people try to decide what a team did.

 

Yeah, you basically tried to turn the opponent over and if you didn't you funneled them toward the goal, then tried to strike back before they knew what hit them. That's why they'd teach Stumer to get under the goal and catch it coming out of the net.

But you're right, they'd be all over the place trying to turn you over.

 

Well, you ain't going to pick and pop without at least the threat of dribble penetration. The screener doesn't get open for the jumper unless his man steps over to help against the dribbler. So they go hand-in-hand.

 

Joe Nocera rips the NCAA in today's Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/09/opinion/09nocera.html?_r=1

 

As opposed to a parade of poorly-conceived shots thrown up with 3 on the shot clock in hopes of "using up the clock."


The game of basketball is terminally constipated, with the conventional-wisdom fixation (fueled mainly by idiot sycophant commentators) on "the right way to play" the bowling-ball-size mass of compressed fecal matter in its collective bowels.

Nobody ever fast breaks.

Ever.

Nobody ever presses.

Ever.

Nobody ever takes a 10-17 foor jump shot.

Ever.

Everybody (with rare exceptions) plays the same goddamn way -- walk the ball up, spread around the arc, set a high screen, kick out, be sure and milk the clock down under 5, then take a 3-point shot. That's it.

The way to expel the fecal bowling ball is to adopt the two 8-second rules I posted above, which would provide huge incentives to fast break and also play pressure defense, but much more importantly it would provide a huge incentive for ALL teams to get down court and get into their offense much earlier in the shot clock, instead of the walk-it-down-and-then-stall-for-28-seconds routine now ubiquitous in all levels of basketball.