Just like the twin towers were used to mask Hakeem and Sampson’s defensive deficiencies? I suppose Pop played Duncan and David Robinson together because they were such weak defenders too? No, if you have two extremely effective players at the same position, you play them together if you can. It just so happens that Şengün and Adams were better than expected playing together.
I think the main benefit of the double big lineup on defense is that Sengun can be freed up to blitz the ball handler in the perimeter.
Nothing like the Ralph and Hakeem or Duncan Robinson. All 4 of those guys were great defenders. Udoka schemes his whole defense to keep Sengun fron guarding really good offensive players or guys who are in pick and roll a lot. Basically, they want to keep him off the ball. We're able to do that because Amen and Brooks are able to cross match against much bigger players. All you have to do is to go look at who Sengun was matched up with the most this season. It wasn't exactly a who's who of offensive talent. When he did get switched to good offensive players, they generally had good numbers against him. During the year in a postgame, Udoka even mention being able to hide Sengun on defense that game- there's a thread about it on CF. But give Udoka credit, for the most part it worked. They were able to cross match Sengun on a weak offensive player and allow him to roam around and help. That allowed him to be a positive contributor on defense. Whether you like Udoka or not, you have to admit that's good coaching. He used the same scheme that he used in Boston but for a different reason. In Boston, he freed up Williams to roam around and cause havoc with his shotblocking. Here, he was preventing teams from taking advantage of Alpi on defense. Alpi isn't a good defender, but we do a really good job of hiding him. The biggest downside is that we couldn't add another weak defender because you can't really hide two guys.
