With Justin Gainey looking like the sure-fire pick to be NC State’s next head coach, we wanted to give you the chance to really get a deeper understanding of the coach the Wolfpack could potentially be landing.
We already talked to former Wolfpack star Julius Hodge to get an idea of who he is as a coach and a person, but if you want to understand his defensive philosophy straight from the source, there is nothing better than this.
Four months ago, Justin Gainey sat down in partnership with ‘Nations of Coaches’ to talk about his defensive philosophy.. It’s long so we’ll break it down in two parts.
Here is Part 1:
Justin Gainey: Man, four years, going into season five right now. It’s the longest I’ve ever been anywhere. So I just, truly a blessing and honor to be here and to be working for Coach Barnes, who is one of the best coaches this profession has seen.
And so first, I just want to thank the nation of coaches for allowing me to share with you guys this morning. Thanks for everybody who woke up early to listen and to learn and to grow.
And at the end, Barclay will leave my contact information and I want to be an open book for everybody. If you had any questions or want to bounce anything, ideas or whatever off of me, please don’t hesitate to give me a call.
And before we get into it, I’ll just preface it. Like we don’t think that or say that, hey man, we are the best or we know everything. We’ve just been able to coach some really good guys that and instill in them the importance of defense. And they’ve bought into what we do. And we’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way. And through those mistakes, we’ve been able to grow and learn and just try to figure different ways out to do different things.
But on a consistent basis, what I would say is from a detail standpoint, we’re very detail oriented and every detail of our defense is something we work on pretty much on a daily basis.
And so right now I’ll share my screen with you.
So first up, just as I thought about, as I was thinking about preparing to speak with the group today, I just kind of thought about the process that we go through every year as we start constructing our defense and what that will look like.
And the kind of the first question we ask ourselves, which has been consistent over the last few years, is like, what shots are we willing to give up conceptually? You know, the message that we share with the team is like, we don’t wanna give up a shot at all. We wanna have however many possessions, defensive possessions in a game, that’s how many shot clock violations we wanna have. But from a conceptual standpoint, we understand that that’s not possible.
And so, you know, we think about, hey, what are we willing to give up? And you know, as a lot of you guys are probably doing, from an analytical standpoint, we look and see what are the worst shots. And so non-paint twos, mid-range shots, runner floaters, pull up jumpers, something we’re willing to give up, contested non-rim twos, non-rhythm threes, and then contested three-point field goal attempts from nine shooters.
But the non-negotiable on all of this is we contest every shot. And whether it’s in practice, whether it’s in individual workouts, guys are playing one-on-one, we make it a habit to contest every shot, whether they can shoot it, not shoot it, on scouting report, you have to get out there and contest because, you know, as we tell our guys, these are division one players, these are college players. Anybody can make a wide open, you know, dare shot, and we’re not daring anybody.
Then the next question is, you know, does our scheme, does our scheme fit our personnel on how we want to defend? And things we kind of ask ourselves, positional size. The last four years, we’ve been smaller at the point guard position, so we weren’t able to switch as much as sometimes we would have liked to. But Zakai was a dog on defense, really set the tone for us, and it was exceptional. And, you know, SEC defensive player of the year, runner up in the second, in his senior year.
And so he was unique in that and allowed us to do some different things. So his positional size allowed us to be more aggressive, to really extend our defense and to put a lot of pressure on ball.
Athleticism, you know, how well do our guys move? And I also lump into like mobility of post players. That’ll determine how we gonna guard our ball screen actions. Are we gonna get all the way out in hard hedging? Are we gonna be more in a drop position? Those are all things we kind of think about as we start preparing for games and start putting our defensive packages together.
And then also like from a defensive standpoint, who are the guys that need to get better, right? We identify those guys and we’re not letting them off the hook. And so when we identify those guys, that necessarily mean, hey, you don’t have to guard. It means probably in practice, you’re taking the toughest assignment every day. You’re having to get some extra defensive work, whether at the end of practice, throughout practice, you know, on a daily basis.
But those are the guys we identify early. And those are the guys that we’re spending even more film, even more breakdown drills on making sure they get up to par. Because for us, you know, defending is a non-negotiable. If you can’t guard, if you’re not putting effort on that side of the ball, then you just can’t play, right? You can’t play.
For us, you know, I can’t do it. I’ve never been a good defender. Those aren’t good enough responses. You gotta figure it out.
Kind of some core values that, you know, that we live by on the defensive side. And we’ll start with eliminating early baskets. We wanna keep teams out of transition and we do that by valuing the basketball. Limiting our turnovers and limiting poor shot selection.
Our transition D starts on the rise of the shot. And when that shot goes up, we wanna have a relentless mentality on that offensive back. But we send four to the backboard and we get one back. And our thought process is, if they got a box out, then they can’t leak out and get out in transition.
And as good as offenses have gotten, you know, over the years, you know, if you’re just lining up and playing in the half court, it makes it really tough, right? It makes it really tough on the offense to score. That’s what we want. We want offenses to have to play us in the half court. And so eliminating that transition, if we can do a good job there, puts us in a much better chance to get a stop.
And then a transition, we really focus on those first three steps, getting out, running, getting back, getting turned around and getting mashed up.
Protect the paint, protect the rim. We play in our gaps. So we wanna be early in our gaps, we wanna be active in our gaps, making plays within the gaps. Out of the gaps, elite closeouts. And I’ll show you what I’m talking about when I say bear hug on the closeout. So we’ll come out with a high hand, but then we’re gonna hit and pop back, break down and bear hug that defender. We don’t wanna give them any angle to the basket. You gotta square them up, keep your back to the basket and we’re playing them straight up.
And then you gotta guard the ball. Take pride in guarding the ball, take pride in keeping your man in front of you. Yeah, we have gap help, but you gotta take pride in not needing any help.
Clear and consistent communication. Early talk, early talk. And then there’s no debate. Once the big calls the coverage, there’s no debate. Whether he was right in the call, wrong in the call, it doesn’t matter. He called it out, he called it early. You heard it guard, there’s no debate there. Same with switches, same with rotations. There’s no debate. The guy makes the call, the player makes the call, we live with it. We’ll talk about it on the bench of whether it could have been better or what we could have done better on that. But on the moment, on the fly, there’s no debate.
And then the last thing is just finishing possessions. We finish our possessions with fix it plays, there’s gonna be breakdowns, right? There’s gonna be situations where the play doesn’t work out how we want it. Well, we call these fix it plays. You gotta fix it. Whether it’s a rotation late for a block shot, whether it’s helping out in a gap, whether it’s flying out on a rotation, right? Fix it plays, we gotta be great in those, elite in those. One and done, we limit teams to one shot. Block them out, get them off the backboard, go get the ball, and then all 50-50 balls. We take pride in trying to get as many as those as we can.
First thing I wanna start out with is just kind of the drill work, right? So we’ll start out from a few practice clips I wanted to show with you, and then we’ll go into, you know, what it kind of looks like in the game when we put it together.
A lot of our drill work is, for the most part, five on five. We will break down to some four on four, and then we’ll break down into some one-on-one situations.
But the first thing I wanted to show you is just kind of our shell. And as you look at it right here, it’s just your typical four-man shell, and we’ll align our guys in different positions. But right here, you can see we’re gonna be working out, working on our closeouts, okay? And with all of our guys, you see the bigs on the back line, that’s how you should look, right? We’re in the stands, we put a big emphasis on getting your hands out. This year, we have a really big team, and we feel like, you know, having our hands out kind of gives the optical illusion of that there’s not as much space on the court as there is, right? And so we wanna take away passing lines, vision lines, and we feel like by having our hands out when off the ball really helps with that.
And so Felix and Igor on that back line are perfect. And where they’re in right now, we call it pinch stand. So if a man is in the deep corner, we’re not in our gap, higher in our gap, we’re more in a pinch stance, and we’re ready to make a play out of that gap.
And I’ll let this clip kind of roll, but what you’ll see is on the closeout, Zakai does a great job of hitting with high hands, popping back, and bear hugging the offensive player. Same thing with Felix. And I don’t, he does a great job of hitting, popping back, and bear hugging. As you notice, none of our guys are giving up angles to the basket.
Right, so that’s one breakdown.
Next one is, you know, when I talked about recognizing who are the guys that’s gotta get better on the defensive end. And right here, you know, Chaz was one of those guys, and Chaz was a good, got better as a defender as the season went on. And what we would do with him on a daily basis is make him guard a lot of different actions that we know he would see. And as a guy that, you know, we were relying on the score a lot, we understood the defenses were gonna be attacking him. And so this is one action that we would put him in and make him guard, you know, for whatever, 15 seconds or until the offensive player got a good look at it.
And this clip is a little choppy. But here he’s just having a lock-in trail off of screens and defend guys off screens.
Next is the shell drill. And this version of it, we kind of get extended. We extend the shell. And I don’t know if it’s choppy on you guys’ end. And again, you’ll have my contact information and I can get these clips to you. And then I’d be more than happy to kind of talk you through them.
But here we kind of went three-quarter court shell where we extend our defense. We don’t have the corners field, so we’re more in a traditional, in our gaps. But the same thing applies, right? You see Zaki right here does a great job of crowding the defender, pressure him. And everything we do, we want to pressure the basketball. And those guys have confidence knowing that they have gap help if they are beat. Not that you’re allowing yourself to be beat and you’re taking yourself out of the play, but there is gap coverage there. And so you can get up and pressure the ball.
And here we got the offense in a, just kind of a pass and cut, no ball screen type of movement just to get our guys moving. And you see as guys are reacting, you got to close out, break down, and you’re ready to just hit, pop back and bear hug.
So I think you get it.
Next drill, we call the mind drill. And so we talked about fix it plays, making fix it plays. This is one drill that helps us, one, build communication between the group, build confidence that we know that the guys know that they have each other’s back. And so it’s a three on four drill. We having to constantly rotate and we put eight seconds on the clock and guys have to rotate and finish the drill with the contest.
Next drill, verticality drill. We take pride in no contested shots. And so even at the rim, we want to make sure we contest it. And with them not kind of making the charge call not as relevant, we spend extra time now on what we call verticality, okay? And this is the verticality drill number one that we’ll work on from the perimeter guards are guarding in the corner. You have to rotate to help. And now you just got to go straight up and make the offense finish over the top.
Second part of that drill, and we’ll have the guards do this as well, where you have to make plays off of the white line. The white line is the men line, right? It’s right down the middle of the floor. And within this play, you’ll see the bigs are going. And now you just got to go vertical with the guard. I mean, with the offensive player, again, make him finish over the top. A lot of time guys will start twisting and or swiping down and we’ll call foul and you got to do that over. You just got to go straight up and make them finish over the top.
Next thing, making plays off the white line. Here, we call this the Siakam contest where you have to, off the white line, you’re in help. You find yourself in rotation and a fix it play. And now you have to fly off, leave your feet before the defender gets into the shot, give a high contest. And then the goal is to sprint back in the play and get the rebound before the ball hits the floor. And as you saw, Amari did a really good job with that, with a high contest and then getting back into play.
And as we look at it and put it all together for the games, here’s some of what it looks like.
So here’s a transition situation. Zakai does a great job of sprinting back and covering the basket. We put pressure on the backboard. We sent all four guys in. Here they are in a push. Zakai’s job is to not give up an uncontested layup. And so here he gets to the top of the charge circle, just like in our verticality drill, he goes straight up. And now the other guys come back into play and clean it up one and done to finish the possession.
Here we are again, they go out, right? We don’t die on any plays. We keep coming. Jordan does a great job of contesting the layup. And then Igor does a good job of continuing to finish the play, get in there and contest it. And then the other guys fill in, finish the play, rebound.
Here’s a look of what it should look like for us when that shot goes up and we got guys crashing. Arkansas was a team that wanted to get out and run. We felt like we really had to put a lot of pressure on the backboard and make them box out. And what we found out was, you know, like instead of leaking out in this game, they did put an emphasis on getting forward in the paint and trying to go rebound. And, you know, although we missed it, we do a good job of getting guys on the backboard. And what that does is kind of slow down their break.
Guarding the ball. We talk about this all the time. You gotta be able to guard your man. You gotta be able to guard the ball, keep the ball in front of you and not need any help. And here we’re at the top of the floor. Jordan does a good job of not allowing himself to get screened. Then it’s a switch where Bishop does a great job of not allowing himself to get screened.
Fighting through the screens. Side ball screen. We talk to our guys a lot about not allowing the reject. All right, you dictate the ball once you hear the call and you gotta fight that reject. If you get rejected, that’s on you. You gotta put that fire out, all right? You got the help.
The Big does a great job. Felix is doing a great job right now of calling out the direction. You can see him talking. Igor is in great position. Got his hands out. Weak side is pulled over. We call those guys Igor, Chaz, and Jemai. We call those the three others, right? We got the two in the ball screen. This guy here in the red tries to reject. We do a good job of fighting that reject and making him use the screen.
In this particular instance, I feel like Fee is one of the best defensive bigs in the country. Not only with his talk, but also with his positioning. And here, we’re hedging on this side ball screen. Jemai could be pulled over a little bit more, but he knows who he’s guarding on that backside. And he kind of knows the action and what they’re trying to get to. So he’s staying a little closer so he can chase off. But here he’s chasing off that handoff. And again, we take pride here in not allowing any paint touches. And Igor does a good job. He sees that Jemai is behind the play. He’s not gonna get in front. Again, it’s another fix-it play. He sees it. He calls him off, switch it. He has the ball. The goal is not to let it get to the paint. Jemai does a good job of getting back in front. And now we have a switch situation with our bigs. We’re telling them, and our guards, all of our guys, when you switch, you gotta switch up. In isolation situations, you can’t have your feet inside the three-point line. And Igor here does a great job of getting his feet outside the three. He has active hands. Chaz is in his gap. It’s perfect. Jordan could be over a little more, but he knows he has a shooter. I think this guy, Aiden Holloway, was shooting like 40% from three. And so he wants to stay a little closer to him. But Igor does a great job of cushioning, containing, keeping the ball in front. Sears doesn’t get into the paint until late. But even when he does, Igor does a great job of staying between ball and basket. And now he’s contesting that shot at the end. That’s a really good possession there.
Again, staying with protecting the paint. Igor does a good job, again, switching this action. In this game, they had four guys on the floor that could all shoot. And so we were switching at that. But again, Igor was really good at containing that ball. And notice our gaps. Guys are in the gaps, and they’re not just watching. They’re there to make plays on those pickups. Felt like this team did a really good job of attacking guys on the pickup of the ball, whether they were striding out to get to the basket or trying to play off two feet to get to the paint. Felt like this team in particular were really good at making plays in the gap and attacking those pickups.
We always want to bring a level of physicality to everything we do. And Jemai Meshack was one of the most physical guard defenders there were in the country. And he was elite. He was elite. And you saw at the top of that ball screen, he refused to get screened, blew it up. And then Chaz did a good job. And he grew a lot in this area of swiping on this DHL. And we want to run guys off of this as much as we can, not only with our body, but we also talk about the hand closest to the ball, also using that to swipe to deter the offensive guy from being able to come off that handoff clean and take it. And then you see Jordan’s in a really good gap position there to help take away the paint on his handoff. But Chaz does a great job. Jemai does a great job of being up on the ball. And then he’s just taking it.
Communication. Communication is key because during the flow of the game, yeah, we want to call, we want to play possessions a certain way, but we always give our guys the option of if they see something and they feel something to react to it and they can communicate it out. As long as they communicate it out, we’re good with it and we can talk about it later.
But right here, Kade does a great job of switching his ball screen. And there’s not a lot of times a guy gets hit, but, you know, some teams made an emphasis on making sure that they really hit them on these ball screens. And Oklahoma in this position does a good job of hitting them. Kade does a great job of helping up and not allowing the offense to break the three point line. He keeps his feet outside the three. And Zakai does a great job of getting in that gap. And again, on that pickup, tying the ball up with two hands, not just being a spectator in the gap.
Here right now, Darlingstone is playing at the four spot and he switched the ball screen. But here’s another example of just being physical. On the handoffs, more times than not, we want to run them off, but if they get caught trailing and playing behind, we don’t want to stay in a trail position. And so we give them the option of, if you trail and you feel like you can’t run them off, then you can navigate that screen. Navigating meaning you can trail it or you can get through. And right here, Jermond does a good job of taking them to the level. He navigates the screen, get back in front, doesn’t give the offensive player an angle to the basket, keeps moving, and he’s physical to keep them away from the basket and doesn’t give them any angles and make them finish through.
A couple of fix it plays I wanted you guys to see. Here, ball screen coverage. And what you’ll find is teams will make adjustments. And as a defensive team, you got to be ready to make adjustments on the call. And so here, Alabama starts slipping out of this middle ball screen and we have a blown coverage. So now it turns into a fix it situation. And Felix does a great job of not giving up the basket, but also what we call bluffing and staying at the ball. Because if he helps up too early, he’s going to expose the rim for a lob. And so he does a great job of cat and mouse in his thing. And then at the end, making a play at the basket to protect the rim. And he kind of, he fixes that play for a situation where Jermai and Igor had a blown coverage up top. But Igor doesn’t stop playing. He comes back and he gives a good contest as well.
