Getting Real (HV Weekly 10/23/20)
Defending the Princeton, no-baseline defense, and 40 under 40.
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Part one: Villanova. Part two: Illinois. Part three: Louisville. Part four: Richmond. Once the season begins, HV+ subscribers will receive the “The Starting Five” every Monday — featuring actions, stats, and thoughts from the previous weekend of games.
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Hoop Vision was also in the news this week, receiving a couple different forms of recognition from writers at the Athletic. That recognition had me feeling introspective, which I wrote about in the last section of this newsletter.
But first we start out with this week’s HV+ season preview: Richmond’s Princeton offense.
How do you guard the Princeton?
In this week’s Hoop Vision PLUS preview, we broke down Chris Mooney’s Princeton offense at Richmond. In particular, the “domino effect” — where backdoor cuts and off-ball movement build off of each other to progressively stress the defense.
We also detailed six defensive concepts that can help counter the domino effect. Not all six apply to every defense, but they are potential solutions for reducing the efficiency of the Princeton depending on the situation.
The final concept on the list was no-baseline.
Because of the spacing and off-ball movement, Richmond (and other Princeton teams) like to run designed sets for automatic baseline drives. Basically, defenses are so preoccupied with the other action that they lose their normal help positioning and principles.
So a simple (although easier said than done, of course) solution is to implement a no-baseline philosophy — sending the ball back to the middle.
Here are two examples of Duquesne and Davidson successfully taking away the baseline.
Thinking about this a little further since Monday’s article…
Defenses that send the ball to the baseline (aka no-middle) are very reliant on “low” help — preferably outside the paint. The two biggest ways for an offense to create more difficult low help responsibilities for a defense are:
Spacing… Low help is easier to execute when the offense has a big positioned in the paint. There isn’t as much ground to cover and the defense has a better idea of who will be the designated helper ahead of time (less randomness)
Off-ball movement… Low help is easier to execute when the offense is stationary for some of the same general reasons as in #1. Movement can change a defense’s help responsibilities (more randomness)
The most obvious way for a no-middle defense to combat opponent off-ball movement is just by switching — it’s certainly been a key to Texas Tech’s scheme. By switching, help responsibilities stay the same even while offensive movement occurs.
But against a Princeton offense, the defensive focus is naturally placed on stopping the off-ball action. So sending the ball into the middle is a potential way to simplify the gameplan for off-ball defenders when playing against movement heavy offenses like the Princeton.
For the entire list of concepts for defending the Princeton offense, become a Hoop Vision PLUS subscriber today.
Links from around the internet
Adrian Atkinson tweeted out a fun video of some “cutting-edge” analytics from a 1984 TV broadcast
Stumbled on an interesting video the other day from Oliver O'Connell about how he landed a GA spot at Ohio State coming all the way from New Zealand
Haven’t watched this one yet, but it’s on my to-do list: 5-Out Delay Offense clinic by Clippers coach/scout Dave Severns. An offense that continues to be used more and more by college teams
Hoop Vision in the news
Earlier this week, Hoop Vision was the subject of some attention over at The Athletic.
Eamonn Brennan published an article featuring 10 college basketball Twitter accounts, with @hoopvision68 right at the top. Seth Davis published a 40 under 40 list of “rising stars” — coaches, reporters, analysts, and so on — in men’s college basketball. I cracked that list as well, sandwiched right in between Jon Scheyer and Travis Steele.
It’s an ego-boosting achievement and (of course) my first instinct was to (superficially) plot out a social media response. Should I tweet out a link to the 40 under 40 list with a caption about being “humbled”? Should I casually retweet the article and not draw as much attention…while still drawing attention?
Ultimately, the answer I reached was to use this space in the newsletter to take the opportunity to actually be transparent about my feelings towards receiving recognition.
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There’s something about the nerdy analytics guy working on a basketball staff that makes for a good story. If your favorite team has an analytics staffer, a media member is going to tell you all about it.
Just a few months into my time as a grad assistant at Nevada in 2015, Chris Murray of the Reno Gazette-Journal published a profile of my role on the staff.
I’d be lying if I said the recognition didn’t feel good. I got to brag to my friends and family, sent a copy of the newspaper back home to my parents, put out a nice tweet… the whole nine yards.
But there were also significant feelings of guilt. It’s not that the article wasn’t true, but it only detailed the most glamorous parts of my job — leaving out many details of the daily grind that comes with the life of grad assistant. Ironically, I can even remember that I was on the way to picking up our team meal as the article went live. (That part of the job was not mentioned in the piece.)
More importantly, I felt that I was receiving a disproportionate amount of publicity relative to the other members of our coaching staff. For example, we had two other grad assistants on staff working just as hard. And that’s not even to mention our regular assistant coaches responsible for the most important functions of a basketball program: recruiting and on-court coaching.
So I found that any fulfillment derived from the media attention was short-lived. For a couple days it would feel great, but ultimately it felt at best misleading and at worst unearned. And it certainly didn’t change that I was still an anxious volunteer GA — with no prior work experience — getting comfortable in a new environment.
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That brings me back to the 40 under 40 list.
It does provide some form of validation for taking the risk to start Hoop Vision. It was a painstaking process when deciding to leave or stay at New Mexico State back in 2018. Since then, there are some months where it’s felt like a great decision and some months where it’s felt like a bad decision.
But again the list creates some feelings of impostor syndrome. I’m proud of what we have done with Hoop Vision, but — just like the Nevada article — only the successes are curated for social media. On the flip side, I’m personally still living with my parents and Hoop Vision is still in the growth and “proof of concept” phase as we try to make it a fully sustainable business.
However, unlike the initial unknowns involved in stepping into a new venture, the path to sustainability at least now feels a lot more in our control. We’ve made progress.
So bring on season number three.