[Coaching Better Basketball]Rockets Defense on Kobe

Good post

 

That just makes me feel so happy. You won't see any better, right now Battier is the best 1on1 defensed in the leauge. Just look at our winning streak, look at opponent's best players' stats. That tells everything.

Battier defense was phenomenal, you cannot add much to 11/33. He made Kobe go to work. He made him take tough shoots. It wast just great to watch it.

Maybe McGrady had horrible game (and he did) but Kobe didn't have any better. If Tracy would have attempted 33 shoots he would have probably score the same.

 

Fantastic post...

DD

 

Great point. Help defense on Kobe was very important. Battier was great. But if it were 1-on-1 game, Kobe could fairly easily driven past Battier. Hayes and Scola were able to cut him off most of the times when Kobe drove past Battier. And the defensive rotation was very solid.

And they did a great job switching off or trapping him when they set screens for Kobe. The defense against the picks was much better with faster big men like Hayes or Scola than with Deke or Yao.

 

I honestly don't think what Battier did last night -- 1-on-1 mind you -- has gotten the recognition it deserves. I've been watching basketball for a while, and Battier's defense on Kobe last night was a text-book perfection unlike anything I've seen in this league for over a decade. Last time I saw such stifling defense on a superstar was Scottie Pippen on Magic Johnson in '91 Finals...and back then they allowed hand checking/much more aggressive perimeter defense.

In this new era of 'soft' perimeter defense, and in a league with rules premised on facilitating the individual 'greatness' of perimeter players, I've never seen a defensive performance on par with what Shane Courtney Battier did to Kobe Bean Bryant. His performance was peerless.

 

The most important part is communicating and everyone knowing what to do. If you talk on defense, you're going to be hard to beat. Especially if you have defensive minded players.

 

this makes me notice our help defense which i hadnt previously... thanks, he wrote a good post on that blog

 

When we go small with Chuck and Scola or Landry and Scola, we lose a little in the paint defense/rebounding but it more than makes up our pick n roll (PNR) defense. This is going to be tremendous against Golden State and Utah.

 

Shane's a great defender, and our team defense is awesome...

BUT, I'm not going to be getting as giddy as everyone else about the defense played on Kobe yesterday, because sometimes some people have worse games. Typically Kobe goes bananas against our similar defense.

The only difference today, which actually did help, a lot, is the lack of Yao, meaning Chuck or Scola were able to do a better job keeping Kobe in front of them while staying close enough to contest a jumper.

Was it great defense? Yes. Could Kobe have gone off for 40+ against the same defense half of the time anyway? Yes.

 

no he doesn't typically go bananas against this kind of defense. he had two 53 point games last season, but it took him 82 shots to get those 106 points. and the other two games he was like 8 for 24 from the field and around 20 points. chucking and hoping is not a strategy.

 

here are his 4 games against similar defense last season:

1: 8-26 23 pts LAL W (no t-mac)
2: 17-38 53 pts LAL W (no t-mac)
3: 6 -18 20 pts HOU W (no yao)
4: 19-44 53 pts HOU W (both played)

39.6% shooting is pretty effective defense.

 

Most coaches kinda have different ideas on forcing players one way or the other. I've had a hs coach that would bench u if a guy went baseline. My college coach would ride u back to the bus if a guys was allowed to go middle. My thinking is, if a guy gets in the middle of ur defense, ur toast. Now the defense collapses and its like a mini 3 on 2 break. That's one of the main reason why Spurs have dogged Phoenix. They can't keep Parker out of the middle. When u force a guy baseline, u actually have 2 defenders witht the out of bounds.

 

Force baseline is a better option when you do it right. When you have a help coming from the middle to cut off the baseline, and the defender cover the lane. The offensive player is basically trapped. He would have no angle to pass the ball out, and the baseline acts like an extra defender. Where driving to the middle means sucking more than 2 defenders to the lane, the offensive player have a better angle to pass the ball back to the 3 point line for uncontested 3 pointer.

 

Last night we played really smart on the defensive end. We let Kobe gt those isolation but he got a tough job. We were not double-teaming him every single time when he got the ball but we made him go to work. Kobe got simply 2 options to play. 1st was to pull up for a well contested jumper by Battier, who is taller than Kobe is (he didn't make them) and the 2nd option was to drive, but when he did it there was a quick help and he couldn't do anything. We were helping each other which is key on the defensive end. Battier did phenomenal job on Kobe, but as a team we also did very well, not only on Kobe.

 

That's kind of my point. Sometimes he does it effectively, sometimes not as much. But 53 points, twice, plus another 45 earlier in this year, plus another 30 this year. It may not be "efficient" all the time, but it is pretty good. Especialyl considering last year the Lakers were not the same team as this year and were much more of a one man show.

On top of that, keep in mind when a lot of those points are scored. Kobe may be relatievely inefficient for 3 quarters then kill you, as he's done to us a few times in the last 2 seasons.

All that said, my point is just that sometimes Kobe goes off against us, sometimes he doesn't. I definitely prefer that to him destroying us every time, like he does against a Toronto, Washington, Seattle, Utah (see Yahoo split stats - http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/players/3118/splits?year=2007&type=Fielding). So of course I give Battier props for yesterday, just also noting it depends a lot on Kobe, too. Heck, looks like in the past 4 seasons, we "defended" him best in 2005 for some reason?

 

That's about Rafer's shooting percentage for last year, also. LOL. I would say that's pretty good defense, when Kobe is shooting like Rafer.

 

You can't stop Kobe, you can only hope to make him less efficient. If you can turn Kobe from playmaker to ball-hogging chucker, you've increased your chances of winning significantly. Sometimes he'll score 50+, sometimes he'll shoot his team out of the game.

Why they didn't go into Lamar Odom every time boggles my mind. He was killing us in the paint. Why they went underneath the screens I don't understand either. Rafer has historically been a terrible finisher, but a decent 3-point shooter. Vujacic should have been bodying up Rafer all the way down the floor the whole game, not just the last 45 seconds.