With Justin Gainey now confirmed to be NC State’s next head coach, we wanted to give you the chance to really get a deeper understanding of what he brings to the table.
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. We posted part 1 yesterday morning.
Here is part 2:
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Justin Gainey: Another look at a ball, a blown ball screen coverage kind of gets rejected. Jordan gets caught up and instead of switching, Jordan continued to come with the ball. It should have been a switch. So it’s a blown coverage. Darlingstone, great job being on the white line and just making plays, just fixing the situation. And guys continuing to play, continue to make plays. And I love the bench reaction. Active in our gaps. Good job here by Zaki. Fix the situation, Zaki. Great job of being in the gap on the handoff. Chaz got hit and he’s there to make the play. This kind of combines verticality and fix it. Igor wasn’t as much as a rim protection, as much as a shot blocker at the rim as Felix was. But here he is in this situation, playing the white line does a great job. And again, this is things we drill every single day. Good job of going vertical there. And then here’s an example of the Siakam drill. And again, another fix the situation. Not great in transition, get the ball stopped late. But K, taking drill to game, leaves his feet early and is able to get to that Siakam situation.
Underneath out of bounds. We want to be disruptive. Per Ken Palm, we were one of the top teams in underneath out of bounds defense, Ken Palm and Synergy. And we would mix up our looks underneath out of bounds just to kind of keep teams off balance. Here’s one possession of where we call it hot. It’s where we switch everything underneath out of bounds. And based on personnel, based on the game, is when we dictate when we want to get to this package. But it’s been really good to us. But the thing we’ve learned is one, you got to have huge activity on the ball and you got to have mobility on the ball. And whether that’s your five or your four, having size, having size that can move and anticipate is huge because we asked him to clean up a lot. He’s the main fix it guy in this situation because he’s got to make the vision of the inbounder really, really tough. And Felix in this clip is doing an unbelievable job of making it tough for that inbounder to see. On the backside, the guys that are guarding the players inbounds, their rules are you got to talk, you got to touch and you got to take before you switch anything. And so these guys do a great job of here coming together on the inside, Jordan and Chaz. Chaz, great job with the hands of being out. And then Jermai under the basket, his physicality, because they’ll run guys into the paint and try to be physical. You got to be physical, got to stand them up, got to fight, but also just watch Felix, his activity, his active hands. In this situation, guards are going to get caught on bigs. You got to be ready to fight, got to be ready to rotate. And Zakai does a great job of covering down and being ready to take that away. But these plays energize our team, give the guys confidence and ramps up the tenacity.
Here’s another alignment. Again, we’ll talk about this a lot in scouting, but the big thing with that is like, because when you go into that package, you’re going to see a lot of things from the offense that might not have seen a lot doing on film or in scouting. And so it’s important that our guys are talking, are touching, are taking.
Then the last phase I wanted you guys to just kind of take a look at is from accountability, right? And so we talk a lot about being an elite defensive team, but in order to do that, there has to be some level of accountability. And our guys understand how valuable it is to be really good on defense because offensively, you’re going to make shots some nights, there are going to be some nights you can’t buy one, but you got to be able to count on that defense every single night. And we’ve developed an accountability system that we talk with our guys every day. We show them after every game. And in practice, we’re talking about these numbers. And as you see on this page, this is an example of a post-game defensive efficiency rating that we’ll show our guys. And so if you look at the top where it says up on the defensive efficiency rating, the 0.903 shows where we are at that given moment at that point in the season. And so heading into this Kentucky game, we were at a 0.903, which we labeled as green is where we want to be. In this game, we lost the game 78-73. Kentucky had our number during the regular season, really good offensive team. And they caused us some issues on the defensive end, but we set goals. We set team goals and it starts off with points per possession. And that 0.95 points per possession is our game goal. And we got that number from, we look back on the previous season on, okay, who was the number one defensive team in the country and what their points per possession were. And it was at that 0.95 and that’s where we challenged ourselves. We set that goal. In that game, you can see we came up short, 1.16, didn’t achieve it. Field goal percentage, same thing with possession. That’s where we got that number from. We wanted to be the best in the country. And that’s what the best in the country looked at. Looks like that’s 38%. We want to hold teams under that 38%. And we showed the guys that we were at 50%. There’s no way you’re going to win a game if their field goal percentage is 50%. You’re not going to do it. Made threes allowed. We want to keep them at seven or under. That’s more of a number that we set. We’re not a team and we’ve done good from a three-point percentage standpoint. Teams not shooting a high percentage on us, but we’re not a team that wants to just take away the three because more times than not, we’re going to be in our gaps. But we want to close out the gap and force teams into contested three. Seven is our number. We want to be below that in this game. We didn’t achieve it. They made 12 of them. Scoring defense, we want to hold teams under 65 points. And I remember a couple years ago when we were, I think, number one defense team in the country, when we held them to 63 or less, I think we were undefeated. And so 65 is our number there. This game, we didn’t achieve it. Sacks, when you get three stops in a row, we call it a sack. A lot of places I’ve been, they call them different things, kills or whatever. But we want to have seven or more of those within a game. And that’s a lot. That’s really tough to get. We’ve done a pretty good job at it, but that’s what we set the goal at. We try to make that really tough at them. In this game, we didn’t do it. Deflections, we set our goal at 35. And in this game, we didn’t hit those goals. So as you can see, on our team goals, it’s a lot of red and we didn’t get the job done. We lost that game.
And now if we pull over to the individual. So we have the team goals that we look at, and then we look at it from an individual standpoint. So we’re holding the team accountable, and then individually, we hold you accountable. When we look over here, to be in the green, you had to hold your guy to less than 13 points allowed. And so you look over, let’s look at Felix. 14 points allowed within 24 minutes, points per possession, 23.3. And so that number has to be below 13. So if a guy only played, like you look at Dubois in that game, he only played five, he only played 18 minutes and only gave up five points in that segment of time, just points per 40 with 11.1. And so that’s kind of how we hold them accountable. And so after the game, this is the first clip they see when I present defense is the defensive ratings and where they are. And our guys get real competitive with it, and they hold each other accountable with it as well. And you’ll hear guys, loud voices, like Meshack, like Ziegler, talking to guys about, hey man, we got to get everybody in the green. That’s unacceptable that, you know, guys are playing heavy minutes and they’re not in the green. We got to be able to count on you. And so we found this to be really, really effective. And I got a couple clips just to show you, to show you how we grade it out.
Yeah. But yeah, so on that, what it is, is, you know, it is for one score, not one guy just gets the two points. Everybody that’s involved in the play could get a 0.5, you know, a half of a 0.1 point to show, hey, you got to be in your gap. You got to be on the white line, be on your fix it play. So it’s not just the guy that was guarding the man to score. It’s a whole team effort to get stopped.
Moderator: Yeah. Coach Gainey, thank you so much. Just a couple of questions. You’re so physical at Tennessee. I was out of practice last year, deep into February, getting ready to play an SEC opponent the next day. And the practice was like a preseason practice. I mean, it was long, incredibly intense and defensive oriented. How do you teach physicality to get the results that you get? And I asked that because I noticed your team, they’re more physical, the longer they’re at Tennessee. So just real quickly, a couple steps on how to teach that type of physicality.
Justin Gainey: Yeah. First off, it’s a mentality. It’s a mentality. And I won’t say that every guy that in the program comes in with that mentality. Right. There are some guys that grow in the program in that area. Guys like Jumaane Mayshaq, I mean, you look at him and he physically put together, but he had a physical mentality. But then you look at other guys that came in that might not have had that same makeup. It’s something that we preach every day. We talk about every day. And look, it’s something we do every day. And so a practice in June, July, August, it’s going to look, it’s going to feel very similar to what you saw when you came in in February, because we do feel like it’s an everyday mentality that you feel where you got it. There’s no days off. There’s no days where you can’t be physical. There’s no days that you can’t guard, you can’t defend. And if you kind of pick and choose, hey, today’s going to be an offensive day. Today’s a defensive day. We’re not going to hold you to the fire on defense. Then you get that inconsistency when it comes to the game. So Coach Barnes is big on, you know, we’re going to bring it and we’re going to build that mentality every single day.
Moderator: Yeah. Quickly, Coach, regular practice, how much time on defense?
Justin Gainey: Man, I would say from a drill standpoint, you’re probably looking at 15, 20 to 30 minutes a day, I’d say from a drill standpoint. But we play a lot. We get up and down a lot. And within that, you’re held accountable defensively. If there’s a breakdown, if there’s a blow by, there’s not a contest. You’re held accountable, whether it’s with the down and back, whether it’s with a versa climb, or whether it’s with ropes, whether it’s with pushups. Nothing slides defensively. When we get out of a defensive, quote unquote, defensive drill, everything we do is defensive minded. Everything we do is a defensive drill, every 5-on-5, everything we do is, you know, you think I got to get a stop. I got to defend.
