Vivek Ranadive Was Right About Exactly One Thing and This is It:
Why a Commitment to Full Court Defense Wins the Turnover Battle
by John Mietus
There are six distinct mathematical reasons why a relentless, consistent full court defense will help your team win the turnover battle and consequently, more games. Let’s explore each element individually:
1. 94 feet instead of 24 feet of defense. This means that you guard the entire court for the entire game and allow no advancement of the ball without some degree of pressure. This works because for 70 feet of floor space no offense is going to be able to even attempt a shot, let alone consistently make one. Why give them a free advance up to the shooting zone? Give the offense the opportunity to make mistakes, kick the ball off their foot, pass out of bounds, etc.? There is no need or desire to gamble for steals, just show up and be a barrier to the basket, starting from the other end of the floor.
2. 5 on 4, for five seconds. When your team has scored a basket and the opposing team must take the ball out of bounds they have a time limit under which to inbound the ball. The opponent only gets five seconds to find a pass or they face an automatic turnover if they do not get the ball inbounds. At this time the defense has five defenders on the court to only four offensive players. Cutting off easy inbounds passes and forcing quick decisions repeatedly is a great way to add an extra two or three turnovers per game, without having gambled or really done much of anything. Those two or three possessions could mean on average an extra two or three points for your team and two or three less points for your opponent, for a four to six point total difference. Four to six points is the difference between winning and losing in close contests and keeps you in games where opponents might be 10-12 points better than you on paper.
3. Ten-second half-court timeline. Instead of gambling for steals in the front court, defenses should be aimed at stalling the offense as much as possible while applying controlled pressure once the ball is successfully inbounded so that the offense must operate under time pressure to cross the half court line. Teams under pressure are more likely to make mistakes and the ten second barrier is a free device that helps the defense. Again, it must be emphasized that there is no need to gamble, just apply steady pressure and see what happens. This is typically good for one to two turnovers per game (either passing wildly as a result of the time clock, or simply not beating the ten second count across half courts) as well, another one to two points on average for your team while taking away one to two from the opponent.
4. Unorthodox ball handlers. Even if an offense is able to inbound the ball in under five seconds and successfully advance it past half court in under ten seconds, chances are good that the ball is now out of a primary ball handler’s hands. This means a good opportunity to apply non-gambling pressure again in the half court to someone who is unaccustomed to creating for others off the dribble, or even making sound decisions repeatedly under pressure. Coaches will typically look to get the ball back to their point guard in order to “set up the offense” and a poor decision-making shooting guard or small forward might easily find themselves on the bench if they try to create something on their own, especially if it goes wrong once or twice.
5. Take teams out of structure temporarily. As in the previous example, teams that are not in their typical structure often struggle to make sense of the chaos. A neatly structured team wants to run its offense to beat you and often is confused by having their offensive structure removed. A team that cannot run its offense must rely on its wits and its decision making (which many times are not being trained by teams that rely on heavy structure), hurting their chances of taking or even getting good shots consistently against an organized, pressure defense. Teams that have only trained for structure hate chaos.
6. 30-second (or any time) shot clock. The shot clock adds one more barrier for an offense because if the first five aspects of this defense are followed, a team is just starting to look at its offensive options with around 18-20 seconds remaining on the shot clock, That means less time to find and attempt a good shot on every single possession compared to a team that is able to walk the ball up the floor uncontested into the scoring zone every time. Higher pressure shots lead to more forced shots, lead to poorer quality shots leads to fewer PPS.
All this is to say, winning the turnover battle is not as difficult as it sounds and through proper training a team can learn to be tenacious and persistent at pressing.
Common Coaching Concerns and a Response:
Q. What do I do if I think we do not have the athletes to press?
A. If you are competing against bigger, stronger, faster, more skilled teams all the time you will always get beat in a half-court game. Your best option, regardless of your personnel, is to always apply full court pressure. Giving yourself the most mathematically sound chance to win is your best shot and it limits the physical advantages of every opponent. Also, it emphasizes your team’s physical advantages when you have them, and will help to separate you even further from teams that you should already beat. Training the press in practice every day while improve the fitness level of your athletes to perform the press on game day against whatever opponent is in front of you.
Q. We were down eight points a few weeks ago and I put the press on in the last two minutes of the fourth quarter and it did not work, why would I use it for a whole game?
A. You need to look at a bigger picture. The full court press is not a miracle worker, and on average only generates a handful of turnovers over the course of an entire game of 60 possessions. If you only turn it on expecting to generate three turnovers in two minutes, you are either gambling or not clear on how the math works. Gambling presses are not the answer and good opponents will create odd number advantages when you gamble for steals. You do not need to force turnovers, you simply need to apply waves of pressure over 32-40 minutes and let offenses make their own mistakes.
Q. The press takes some of the control of the game out of my hands and puts it in the brains of my players to make good decisions at game speed. I don’t trust them to make good decisions at high speed.
A. This is why your team needs to practice full court defense and offense every day in training sessions. At first, you will see lots of errors, both offensively and defensively, but gradually your team will begin to improve its decision making and have a heavy advantage when it plays against teams who do not practice every day at this tempo and decision making speed.
Q. Our state does not have a shot clock, so #6 does not apply to me.
A. The first five advantages are still in place and are more than enough to validate using full court pressure to boost your basketball program’s chances of winning games.
Let me leave you with a few examples of how this works, even at high levels. John Wooden won exactly zero national titles before he instituted a full court press. Ten titles later, he is widely considered the greatest college coach of all time, and perhaps the greatest sport coach in history. Rick Pitino has had wild amounts of on-court success at Kentucky and Louisville including two national titles and a competitive team every year by instituting a simple full court press. But perhaps my favorite example is coach Shaka Smart at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) nearly winning a national title a few years ago with a pressing team that clearly was not recruiting at the level of a Kansas, Kentucky, Duke, UCLA type program. The last time a school the size of VCU made the Final Four was… maybe never. And it wouldn’t be possible without full court pressure.
Click on the pdf link to download the Why a Commitment to Full Court Defense Wins the Turnover Battle:
0 Comments