VIDEO: Undisciplined Defense Leading to Problems for NC State

NC State fell 20 points in the NET after struggling to beat one of the worst teams in the NCAA.

Coppin State was 0-10 coming into this game against the Pack, they were scoring fewer than 60 points per game, allowing around 70 and are shooting a sad 24% from 3-point range.

I understand not wanting to change your approach for a team like Coppin State, but in the NET era, every game matters. A win isn’t just a win. If you’re supposed to win by a ton, you better win by a ton or you get penalized. And those penalties can be a make or break when Selection Sunday comes.

If there was ever a game to have your guys back off of the high-level pressure defense and let a team shoot themselves out of a game, it was this one. Coppin State has athletes, but they lack skilled players. They are poor shooters, so going under screens and taking away the drive would be an expected approach.

However, that’s not what we saw.

What we saw was NC State trying to ratchet up the pressure on the Eagles. This allowed them to use their athleticism to get in the lane and make plays. Coppin State hit just 2-9 from 3-point range and didn’t hit a single 3 in the first half, yet they entered the break down just 7 and ended up only losing by 10.

How did this happen when you were picked to win by 32 points?

If you’ve been following along, this has been one of our biggest critiques of this program for years.

The theory is that ramping up the pressure, guarding guys full court, and incentivizing deflections will lead to wearing down your opponent, creating turnovers, and upping the pace, which in turn forces your opponent to take quick, hopefully poor shots.

But there is a big trade-off.

Incentivizing that increased pressure leads to guys too often being beat off the dribble or gambling for point-to-point passes. This forces your help-side defense to react. The bigs have to step up, or the off-guards need to sink down. In both case, this leaves someone wide open, and in a today’s college basketball, where most games are decided by 3-5 possessions, you want every single bucket to be hard-earned.

So the equation becomes, is the increased pace, the easy buckets, and the chaos of constantly needing help side rotation, really worth the turnovers and quick shots you are able to create?

I argue that it’s not. I think there are times and matchups where full-court pressure and bell-to-belly defense is necessary, but subscribing to it all the time seems to be doing more harm than good.

This has been the case for the entirety of Kevin Keatts’ tenure. However, the one time that they were forced to abandon it, they won the ACC Tournament and went on a Final Four run.

With Burns at center and Mike O’Connell at PG, plus a tournament situation where you’re playing multiple games in multiple days, NC State was forced to back off the pressure a bit. Doing that allowed their roster of long, tall, athletes, initially assembled to create full-court chaos, to really clog up the half-court. This forced opponents to take tons of contested shots and limited easy buckets that came off of slow help-side rotation.

I’m not suggesting you turn into Virginia and play a pack-line defense, but I am suggesting that based on the opponent, you alter your strategy and force them to take tough, contested shots over extended arms, instead of daring them to play at a faster pace and hoping they make mistakes and turn the ball over.

Just look at this video.

These are all unforced errors and they cost the Pack 10 points. If Coppin State was a better team it would have cost them 8 more points, for a total of 18. That’s massive. And these were just some of the more apparent ones. There were other examples where Coppin State simply didn’t attack or take advantage of the miscues.

Just these plays cost NC State last night, and it’s not an isolated incident. Far too often guys are out of position because of reaches or gambles. Too often a simple screen on the full-court press creates a downhill mismatch in the open court that results in a simple dump-off for a layup.

This is an 0-10 team taking advantage of these things and on Saturday NC State will be in Lawrence, Kansas facing off against one of the nation’s top teams.

If the Pack is going to commit to playing this type of defense, they have got to be more disciplined about staying between their man and the rim. They need to take it personally when their man is the reason that the entire defense had to rotate for help. They need to read the situation and understand when it’s worth it to jump a pass, and when it’s smarter to just let that pass be made in order to keep good defensive positioning. When it’s worth it to go belly to belly against a defender, or when his shooting percentage warrants giving him a step.

Until they can figure these things out, or until we see any type of shift in strategy, we will continue to watch a defense that is always on its heels, always trying to play catchup on the help-side, and reacting to the ball movement, instead of dictating it.

Keatts is bringing in players who have the talent to compete for a top-tier conference finish almost every year, but I’d argue that the disarray on defense and the amount of easy buckets it allows, is keeping them struggling to make that jump.