NY Times: JVG on Defense, including how to stop Yao

you have a crush on Anna Megan, admit it DD. (What does "DD" stand for again? Something about your preference in women?)

 

I'm not following? On a pick n roll, if you don't "show", or switch or trap with the big, how do you control where the dribbler goes. If the pick isn't a bad, soft one, the dribbler is shedding his defender.

Are you talking about the dribbler's defender overplaying the middle *before* the pick? That can be dangerous if the other team has a mobile big and a good PG playing the 2-man game.

that said, I completely agree, in principal, that keeping good PGs out of the middle, forcing them baseline, is a good thing. I just find that trapping them is better. JVG liked Yao to "show" because it takes time for the PG to dribble out and around him and allows help defense to adjust position on the big and allows both Yao and the small defender to recover back to normal guarding position.

watch, many teams do this to TMac. The push him out by trapping him on our pnr. It's pretty common defense in the NBA. I recall Phil Jackson having Pippen do that in the Finals against Stockton as one of the best defenses of the Stockton /Malone pnr I had seen. Of course, Pippen was such a great defender, most teams couldn't put a SF on Stockton like Jackson had the luxury of doing.