Hi everyone! Hope you’re having a great Christmas Eve and that everyone is staying safe out there. In this guest column, long time SFN member ‘bill.onthebeach’ has penned an article regarding this season’s at times ‘wonky’ offense displayed by the Wolfpack basketball team. It’s no secret that N.C. State hasn’t gotten a lot of offensive production from the post this season. Below, Beach Bill discusses the High Post offense and what he feels may be most effective for this N.C. State team going forward. Feel free to peruse and share your thoughts on his points of contention.
Not the UCLA High Post Offense…
as overheard from the Ghosts on the South Smoking Porch at Reynolds…
Contrary to the number of times the UCLA High Post Offense been ‘mentioned’ mostly by the uninformed…
The 2014 Wolfpack ‘might’ have run this set TEN times this season…
The UCLA High Post
The not-so-big joke is, this Team couldn’t run that offense if you gave them 10K a piece and six months to learn it…
In fact, what we have been trying to run is a offensive set that starts with two guys down low on the blocks… and most everything is designed to get the wing guy a shot or a drive… (option1).
if the point guard doesn’t do something off the charts first…
If the wings are covered, then the middle should be open… and that’s option2 … for the point guard.
The Bigs are option3 and they know it and are mostly looking for rebounds, but if the Big on the ball side clears to give his wingman room to make his move, then we only have one rebounder down low… so we don’t get alot of offensive rebounds.
Here’s the real key… when the pass from the PG to wing is slow…as has been the case most of the time, the defense is in position – nothing good happens…
but when the pass to wing is quick… the defense is out of position and we get options. Basically this only works when the ball goes one way and is quickly reversed to the opposite side, or on a semi-fast break.
Maybe one of fifty plays… we’ve seen a big will move up to the foul line looking for a 12 foot jumper… but most of time when they’re that far from the basket they are setting screens and not thinking about shooting. Of course, it’s hard to get a rebound from out there.
If it takes 8-10 seconds to get all this going, we only have 10-15 seconds to run through all of this…
So, if nothing happens by the time we see 10 – 12 seconds to go on the shot clock…
we start freelancing for some kind of outside shot or drive… by whoever has the ball and can get semi-open..
The problem with that is that most of the time the shooter is off balance, feet are not square to the basket, doesn’t go straight up or whatever else you can do wrong when you shoot the ball, so maybe we make that shot and maybe we don’t.
This is what we have been watching most of the season.
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Now it appears two things have evolved… although they were somewhat masked by Turner’s career night – 30 points two games ago and the “Mugging in the Garden” last Saturday night…
1. Anthony, who has shown great improvement on resisting his natural inclination to do it all by himself, was maimed and mauled for forty minutes in NYC by the Mountaineers, physically and mentally.
It may have been that he said something first, like ‘Coach … I Gotta have some help out there…’ or maybe Coach did not wait for that and just gently made his changes, doesn’t really matter, the result was we saw Lacey playing point guard almost as much as Anthony on set plays last night with Anthony on the wing, instead of on the bench (as was previously the case when Lacey played point). And we saw Anthony “comfortable” with his new position over near the bench…
Barely noticeable to most, Lacey was clearly bringing the ball up the court and running the offense from center court on the first three plays of the second half.
This did a couple of things…
1. Lacey naturally looks inside first for the open Big… ’cause duh… this is what wing guys are supposed to doing.. and surprise, surprise… he found a couple and KW and Abu got a couple of inside baskets… which GOTT the defense thinking something… and that opened up the outside guys by one or two steps or one second…
2. Anthony was Lacey’s option2… and a quick one… so Anthony is still touching the ball a lot and making things happen… Most of the time he either drove to the basket – the difference here is from the wing it’s Anthony on 1 or 2, not 3,4 or 5 – or dribbled back to the top of the key where he’s used to being and then found Lacey open on the wing… and then Lacey made the drive or the shot…
3. With some of the PG pressure off… Anthony relaxed and as Coach said postgame ‘he Gott lost in the game..’ which means, in a good way, he wasn’t thinking, he was just being Cat and just playing… his step got quicker, his confidence rose and he was having major fun just being Cat on the Wing… and he ripped the defense from one end of the court to the basket with blinding speed a couple of times just for fun…
In the meantime… Lacey, our Closer with the Killer Instinct, was still getting his twenty… just like we used to say about Cuz…
Now when we GOTT all three of these options working we went on a 16 -2 explosion over 4 and 1/2 minutes and finshed by outscoring our opponents 39 -15 over the last 13 minutes of the game.
Contrast this with Anthony’s much improved play at point guard… On set plays as Point Guard, he, however, still looks for the drive to hole first, but is now consistently resisting the temptation to go ANTHONY on 3,4 or 5 – but his hesitation tips his hand to the defense – then looks to the wings as Option 2 and he doesn’t waste a lot of time with the Bigs as option 3. If he holds the ball through his reads, then he just goes Anthony on 3,4,5 ’cause there’s less than ten seconds left on the shot clock… that’s Anthony at Point Guard – Season2, nothing more, nothing less.
Also by contrast… in previous games where we scored alot of points, it was generally one guy going off and the rest getting leftovers… or we just out-manned our opponent on defense and got a lot of fast break points.
This was the first time this season we’ve really seen all three options explode at the same time… from the half court offense.
2. The Bigs… Enamored as we all are with Anya, his shot blocking and his enthusiastic bursts of basketball fury… the 2 baskets, 3 rebounds, 2 blocks and 2 fouls in four minute thing… Anya is a major project… and frankly, if one considers his current production as percentage of his potential, is NRFPT… and is high maintenance… Most important at this point in the season, he’s not dependable as in ‘what can we depend on him to do night in and night out?.’
There was no mention of why Anya only played nine minutes. It might have had something to do with his stat line of 0 shots taken, 1 point, 0 rebounds, 2 blocks, 1 foul… idk… maybe he was sick… doesn’t really matter… he was watching this…
Kyle Washington and Abu got his minutes and theirs too.. they GOTT to touch the ball often (Lacey) and GOTT their juices flowing instead of just running the floor looking for an occasional rebound. It was KW’s vocals, directed at his teammates, that fueled the 16-2 run. By game’s end… KW and Abu combined for 21 points and 15 rebounds in, each playing about 25 minutes… and that’s equal to any two of Anya’s best games… and I think it’s safe to say… much more dependable.
We’ve played 12 games and it’s time for all the WHO questions to be have answered for this season…
So how hard is it to figure out that if Lacey is gonna get his 20, Anthony can get lost in the CatZone and KW and ABU can pickup and thrown down 15-20… we’re gonna see more Lacey at Point Guard, more KW and more Abu in the middle and Anya bringing that energy and enthusiam off the bench about five minutes at a time, two or three times a game…. and Kennedy Meeks gets a couple of fouls, I’m betting Anya gets in the game to trade him up a couple more before Uncle Roy can yank him…
Part two… the Green Light guys … Turner gets his chances from the wing and if he’s hot… he’s getting the ball until he misses. If he’s not… then that was Plan B anyway… back to Plan A, as outlined above…
Caleb, off in the bench, has the green light for shooting, as well… plus he seems to make more things happen defensively… so he’s getting minutes…
Part three… Freeman, Dez and Cody and giving solid-all-around minutes while the starters rest.
One happy basketball family… KW is the Daddy, Lacey is the Mama, Anthony is the gifted, precocious, middle child. Quit, Hardheaded and Independent transferred, graduated or opted into the draft last season.
Now let’s play ball and win some games.
Merry Christmas to Everybody at SFN!
