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They haven’t announced the game time yet, supposedly it’ll come sometime tonight.
I haven’t been around the forums much at all this season, but I can’t praise what Wes Moore has done with this team highly enough. Moore won Coach of the Year last season, and deservedly so, but this season has been even more impressive. Last year the team had 4 seniors in the starting lineup. They were experienced, deep, and perfectly suited to play Moore’s 1-in, 4-out system. This year’s team is none of that. They were picked to finish 10th in the ACC by the coaches. They’ve had to replace all that experience. They integrated 2 transfers. They lack the shooting the offense really requires. They didn’t have a capable post backup until Sophomore Erica Cassell started to come on in the last 5 or so games of the season.
After a solid start against a pedestrian OOC schedule, the season reached its low point when they started 1-3 in the ACC, including two of the most brutal quarters of basketball I’ve ever watched. Against Louisville, the first quarter ended 18-1, and that only because they committed a lane violation to give us an extra free throw. 2 games later against Duke, it was a 23-5 opening quarter. In both games, they fought back to get within 4 points in the second half, but they looked rough. I thought right then that it might be a lost season. Then they didn’t lose for a month. They’re now 13-3 since that Duke game. They aren’t nearly as pretty to watch as last year’s squad was, and the offense often looks sluggish and disjointed. Still, they work as hard as any team I’ve ever seen. They rebound like crazy. They’re a great defensive team. They scrap and fight and make it miserable to play against them. I couldn’t be prouder of them, they’ve been better than I ever imagined they would be this season.
It was as badly officiated a game as I’ve seen in a very long time. I don’t think it was particularly biased, just very poorly called, and the amount of fouls called worked against us because we had the shorter bench. There was a run of bad calls against State at the end of the game (Both the 4th and 5th fouls on Miah were unbelievable, and the 4th foul on Chelsea Nelson was terrible), but they made some real stinkers against Texas too. They called a flagrant one on Texas for a perfectly legal play on the ball, that was as bad as any call they made all game. The charge at the end looked like a legit call to me, but the problem is that they hadn’t called it a few minutes earlier on a much clearer charge by Texas’ best player, and this is after they called about 8 charges in the first half. They were inconsistent and incompetent, and it really marred what was a great game.
Miah Spencer and Dominique Wilson played their hearts out. They’ve been some of my favorite players to watch in all my years watching State women’s basketball. They both played the game of their life yesterday, and I hate to see it end this way for them. We had a tremendous group of seniors this year, and I’m going to sorely miss them.
When I wrote that series of posts on our defense, our defensive efficiency was 101.3, ranked 142nd in the nation. Between the second and third post, we played Tennessee St, and Gottfried commented that “we took a major step this week with our defense,” a statement that I expressed some skepticism towards. Well, I was wrong. We clearly did take a big step with our defense, it’s just that it was a step backwards. As mentioned in the article, our defensive efficiency is now 108.1, ranked 213th nationally. We rank behind such noted defensive powerhouses as Lipscomb, Abilene Christian, Gardner Webb and Fort Wayne. Zooming in at just this period of decline is even worse. If you look exclusively at conference games, State’s defensive efficiency is 117.2! That’s embarrassing. To put that in perspective, UNC leads the ACC with a 116.2 offensive rating in conference games. That means that the average team playing against us will score more efficiently than the best offense in the league. We’re so bad that if we fouled a 60% free throw shooter every single time down the floor, we’d expect to give up about as many points as if we actually tried to play defense.
Archie has taken a Dayton team that had been mediocre-to-bad under Brian Gregory and has seen them gradually improve every year he’s been there. Ken Pomeroy’s rankings currently have them ranked #32 this year (ESPN’s BPI has them at #42). Even better, here are where his teams have ranked defensively (nationally) since he took over at Dayton:
2012: 158
2013: 145
2014: 72
2015: 31
2016: 15
2017 (to date): 11That’s awesome. Even before looking at any numbers or records, I was impressed watching his teams play. I haven’t watched many of their games, but every time I see them they play disciplined, well-coached basketball. Even if he didn’t have State connections, he’d probably be the up-and-comer that I’d want. Some school is going to back the dumptruck of money up to him in the next couple years, and it’ll be real tragic if it isn’t us.
The last minute or so, we’ve started not just playing bad defense, but not caring on defense. Guys are standing straight up and just showing no effort. Might as well be over at this point.
To put in perspective how big a win this is, a couple facts. Since 2000, 6 schools have won the women’s NCAA championship (compared to 11 on the men’s side), Notre Dame is one of them. Since they joined the ACC, Notre Dame has lost 1 ACC game. This is their second loss.
I was encouraged by tonight. I’m not going to read too much into it though, cause App State is all kinds of terrible.
Pluses
– Yurt looks awesome. It’s going to take a few games to get him acclimated, but you can see the talent there. He’s really composed and has fantastic touch. Also, I loved to see him fronting the post so much on defense. He’ll be starting before long.
– Again, I’m loathe to draw too much from this game, but the defense looked decidedly more active. They were swarming to the ball and helping on drives much better than I’ve seen in previous games.
-You know, it’s not going to be this year, but every now and then Shaun Kirk shows a little flash of something that makes me go “huh, he might actually turn into a basketball player”. He hit a little step-back J that he looked much smoother on than I expected.
– We have real depth now. I want to see if Gottfried is actually going to use that depth when the rubber meets the road and we’re in big games, but it’s great to see that it’s there.Great read! Very nicely done. Hopefully part 3 goes into a look at fouls, and what causes us to foul so much. Yes, there are “tendencies” in officiating, but there are “tendencies” in the way we play our man to man.
I won’t be talking much about fouls. For one, I don’t think we’re decidedly more foul prone than most teams, and even if we are this year, it hasn’t been a consistent theme among Gottfried’s squads. In fact, if you look at the chart from part 1 of the series, you’ll see that the rate at which we send teams to the free throw line has usually been very good. That’s not a 1-to-1 correlation with fouls committed, but it’s a pretty strong indicator that we’re not fouling at an abnormal rate. I think it’s looked worse than it is the last few years because we’ve had very shallow benches, so the effect of foul trouble is exacerbated.
Also, I think the issues that I’ve already talked about give some indication as to why we sometimes do struggle with fouls. I mentioned in the first section that consistently allowing easy entry passes puts your big men in the tough position of having to continuously defending one on one in the post, which will lead to fouls. Also, giving up offensive rebounds at the rate we do is bound to lead to more fouls. You’re much more likely to foul someone on a rebound putback, because you’re out of position and scrambling to contest shots.
Life kind of got in the way of me getting the next post out as soon as I wanted, but it should hopefully be up tomorrow.
I’m starting to think that Kapita could miss every single shot he takes and still be our best big man. He definitely has some defensive flaws, but he’s better than Anya and worlds better than Abu (who might be having as bad a defensive season as I’ve ever seen from a big man).
Abu has probably directly cost us 8 points so far. He doubled across the lane twice (which is a good idea), but instead of coming over with a hard double and holding position, he jumped at the guy. The first one resulted in him being totally out of position to rebound, and the second resulted in an easy interior pass because he wasn’t blocking anyone’s vision as he flew through the air. Also, at least 3 blown box outs and 1 help assignment where he never stepped up.
Thanks guys. It turned into a busy week for me all of a sudden, but the next one should go up tomorrow covering off-ball stuff and rebounding, and then I’ll have one on the pick&roll on Friday or Saturday.
These 2 OBs are failures at the wing. Each D coverage was a different call. Either that, or Abu is hopelessly lost on the 2nd play.
It’s man with a big on ball. When you do that you must hang with who ya got til the switch comes.
If that’s the case, 1) Man with big on ball is, and has always been, a terrible strategy, since it trades giving up a mismatch for little marginal gain in ball pressure, 2) We botch the execution of it horrifically.
There’s also still the question of what the heck is going on with the first play, where Henderson appears to be playing man, everyone else kind of looks like they’re playing zone, and #43 runs right through the middle of the defense and goes completely unchecked. That’s kind of what I was getting at at the end. I don’t know if it’s a failure of scheme or of execution (I suspect it’s some of both) since we mangle it so badly, but it doesn’t really matter. Whatever the cause, you shouldn’t be having those kind of fundamental breakdowns on routine plays this far into the season.
Hey guys, I’m working on a pretty in-depth post on some of our defensive problems, complete with some video breakdowns from the Illinois game. I’m wondering if it might be something SFN might want to put on the front page. Wasn’t sure how to contact anyone about it, so I figured I’d just drop this here. If not, I’ll just post it here on the forums, but I think it’s big enough and interesting enough that y’all might be interested in putting it on the site.
Never coached (though I’d like to someday), but I played a lot and had some good coaches growing up.
Moore is really terrific. You can tell watching him on the sideline that he’s a perfectionist who is always demanding more from his players, but also that the players really love playing for him. They’re always well-prepared, and he makes great in-game adjustments. He won me over big-time in his first season when we beat then #8 Maryland. A little ways into the second half, Maryland’s Alyssa Thomas (3 time ACC POY, All-American, best player in Maryland history) was 8-12 with 16 points, and Maryland was up by 9. Moore switched to an unorthodox box-and-1, with 5’5 guard Len’Nique Brown shadowing the 6’2 Thomas. Not only did Thomas not score for the next 12 minutes, she didn’t even take a shot. When Thomas finally made a layup with 30 seconds left, the game was essentially over. State won by 9.
Johnson got away with one on that last steal, which makes up for the outrageous foul call on the clean strip he had about a minute earlier.
West Virginia’s national ranking for possessions per game the last 3 seasons: 102nd, 27th, 88th
NC State’s national ranking for possessions per game the last 3 seasons: 173rd, 183rd, 215thWe are not an up-tempo team. Our offense has been one of the slowest in the country the last 3 seasons (average possession length: 18.5s [298th], 19.5s [278th], 19.3s [301st]). Our tempo looks faster because opponents’ possessions are shorter, because we don’t force them to use clock, because we’re bad at defense.
Tempo does not dictate defense. You can be a bad defensive team that loses games in the 60s, and you can be a good defensive team that wins games in the 80s. Louisville always plays faster than we do, and they’ve been a top 5 defense nationally for 6 straight years. VCU consistently plays at a high pace, and their defense is always excellent.
Defense is about culture. It’s not hard to get guys to want to play offense. Everyone wants the ball in their hands, everyone wants to score. It’s hard to get guys to commit on defense every single time down the floor. No prospect comes out of high school thinking “man, I hope I’m the next Bruce Bowen.” It is the coach’s job to make them care as much about defense as about offense. You have to demand effort, and you have to teach awareness. There is zero reason Ralston Turner couldn’t have been less of a space cadet on defense. There is zero reason Caleb Martin couldn’t be a good defender. There is zero reason why Cat Barber shouldn’t have been an absolute menace to opposing ball-handlers. Every single one of those guys had the athleticism and talent to do it. The reason none of that happened is because nobody demanded it of them. Nobody said “if you don’t give consistent effort, you’re going to ride the pine.”
To be fair, our recruits are much different guys than Michigan State and Virginia are looking at. They aren’t looking for straight scorers. They play 50-60 point games. That’s not Gott. We really recruit scorers. We haven’t(until this year) been able to recruit a complete player and we don’t play in a system that is conducive to recruiting defensive minded players, so we take offensive players. Michigan State Virginia and Huggins are unique programs and their players rarely have post college success though they win in college.
That’s an excuse, and it’s a bad one. 1) I don’t care about how many NBA players you produce (and, by the way, both MSU and UVA have produced more NBA players than us lately), I care about how much you win, and those schools win. 2) If you’re only recruiting straight scorers, that’s part of the problem. It’s not a valid excuse, it’s you not doing your job well. 3) Most high-level recruits are primarily scorers, regardless of which team is recruiting them. They’re high-level recruits because they’re exceptional athletes and talented basketball players, they’re usually the primary scorers on their high school teams. It’s the job of the coach to teach them defense and set up a culture that prioritizes it. We don’t do that. 4) We don’t just recruit scorers. Anya was primarily a defensive recruit since day one. Cody Martin was a good defender who consistently got less minutes than his brother (Cody did everything better than Caleb except shoot). Abu wasn’t anything when he got here, he was just an athlete. One of the things that made Cat Barber an elite recruit was his defensive potential. 5) Saying “we don’t play in a system that is conducive to recruiting defensive minded players” is tantamount to saying “we don’t play good defense.”
I can’t imagine that he doesn’t prioritize defense, he actually harps on it during interviews.
Its also possible that his offense draws in recruits that are primarily offensively gifted, and maybe that needs to shift, too. Dunno.“Our pick-and-roll coverages are dire.” How can he fix it? If you know, call into his show or send him an email. We’ll all be better for it : )
Every coach talks about defense in interviews. The evidence of how much you emphasize defense is the way that your team plays defense, and the way you reward good defenders. When players are terrible defenders and you play them a ton of minutes (I’m looking at you, Ralston Turner), they’re never driven to improve. When you set a culture that defense is important and good defenders will be rewarded, you don’t get guys who consistently come out of their stance, lose track of their man, and are three steps late on help rotations. You do not play for Tony Bennett, Bob Huggins or Tom Izzo if you don’t work your butt off on defense. That’s why their teams always play great defense. There’s a culture there. If Gottfried really, really prioritized defense, there’s no way we would be as consistently bad at it, given the caliber of players we bring in.
I don’t know if there’s a way to fix the half court defense without the zone..wish there was a way to improve our man-on-man.
I mean, there are plenty of ways to fix our defense, it just hasn’t happened because Gottfried is a bad defensive coach. I don’t want to say that. I hope more than anything that he gets a great defensive performance out of the team this year, but every piece of evidence says that the guy can’t coach defense. The players on this team almost all have the skill and athleticism to be at very least average defenders, with Rowan being the possible exception (though I’m of the opinion that basically anyone can be an average defender if they work hard enough). What’s been clear for 5 years though is that Gott doesn’t prioritize defense in his rotation choices and the team doesn’t show consistent defensive effort, which tells me that he probably doesn’t prioritize it in practice either.
The effort is one thing, but the schemes are also generally bad. We have consistently been bad at two things during Gott’s tenure. We do not force turnovers, ever. That’s the biggest one. Now, you can play a successful defensive style that doesn’t rely on turnovers. UVA is a great example. They’re not a heavy pressure team and they never gamble. But even their national rank in opponent turnover percentage generally averages around mid-to-low-100s. Here are State’s national rankings for opponent turnover rate under Gottfried: 256th, 320th, 231st, 346th, 331st. You should accidentally stumble your way into more turnovers than that. This isn’t just a conservative-style defense, it’s a defense that puts absolutely zero pressure on opposing offenses. Teams easily get into their sets against us, there’s no ball denial on the wings. Our pick-and-roll coverages are dire. We rarely trap or even show hard, and our help rotations are often defeated by one pass. The upshot of all that is that we’re never dictating what the offense does, we’re never forcing them into 3rd and 4th options. Making an offense scramble is what leads to turnovers, and we never make offenses uncomfortable. This year we have tons of athletic talent and one of the premier ballhawking guards in the country. There is no excuse to not be better at this (early returns are not promising though, through 3 games we’re 223rd nationally). The second thing is that despite being a consistently excellent offensive rebounding team, we are a consistently terrible defensive rebounding team. That’s both the result of poor fundamentals and effort, and of allowing too much penetration (because, again, we can’t guard the pick and roll), which leaves our big men out to dry. We actually are normally well above average at holding our opponents to low shooting percentages, but when you give up so many extra possessions, it just doesn’t matter. Note that neither of these are problems that are solved by a zone, but rather are usually exacerbated by it.
The team this year is going to be very good offensively, there’s too much talent for them not to be (though I have some significant issues with Gott’s offensive system as well). The determiner of whether we will really be elite was always going to be defense. I hope beyond hope that our talent can shine through and Gott (or his assistants) can fix some of these trouble areas, but it might just be that this is who we are under Gott.
I’d be pretty shocked if he returned, but he’s probably not going to be a 1st round pick. I think he’s good enough to stick on an NBA roster, but it’s not going to be an easy road. I’m not going to say he’d be wrong to leave, cause that’s a choice he has to make for him and his family, but there are definitely things he could do with one more year to dramatically improve his NBA stock.
1) Get stronger – This is the big one, and it’s been the same since he arrived at State. He’s never going to be a big dude, but if Cat wants an NBA career he has to get stronger. It affects his ability to finish around the rim on offense, and his ability to fight through picks on defense. His height/reach are perfectly fine for an NBA point guard, but he’s not an explosive leaper and he has a slight frame, and that worries NBA scouts. He’s gotten much better as a finisher this last year, but he often makes shot harder than they have to be because he’s going around contact and not through it.
2) Improve his jumper – He’s made such huge strides with this so far. If he continued to improve at the same pace into next year, he’d be a totally different prospect. A speedy point guard with 20 foot range is containable. A speedy point guard with 22 foot range is a real problem. With more weapons around him next year, he’d also get more of a chance to show he can be a catch-and-shoot threat, as opposed to having to create most of his shots.
3) Show more defensive impact. I think Cat is a plus defender, but he didn’t get much chance to show it last year because he was asked to do so much offensively. On a roster with more weapons, he can afford to devote more energy to showing he can be a lockdown defender.If I’m an NBA scout, those are the things I want to see from Cat Barber. If he adds 10-15 pounds of muscle and becomes a more consistent shooter, that’s the kind of guy who will contribute on an NBA roster.
