North Carolina's defense

I'm foregoing the usual format tonight to talk about something that's been on my mind for a while.

What prompted me to write this post is a discussion on the sports forum of a popular poker message board. There's a thread there that focuses on North Carolina, and in that thread, someone posted this link to a Basketball Prospectus article claiming that the Tar Heels were the best defensive team in the ACC last year and probably would be this year. It's long been my contention that Carolina isn't good enough defensively (I'm representative of the hand-wringing blogger the author referes to in the first several paragraphs of the article), so I finally had to speak up. If you're not already, it might be a good idea to familiarize yourself with the work of Ken Pomeroy so you know the context of the discussion.

Anyway, in response to that link, I posted the following just minutes ago, after Carolina's win at Ohio State tonight. I'll let you know if the discussion leads anywhere on the message board, and I welcome your comments and observations here. Without further ado...

While I recognize that SABRmetric-style stats -- like the ones popularized by Ken Pom and the one cited in that Basketball Prospectus article -- have more utility than traditional "per game" stats, it irritates me that they've seemingly taken the place of good old-fashioned observation.The article asserts that Carolina played the best defense in the ACC last year and probably will again this year. I say "No way!" to both, and not because of any statistic. I don't need statistics to tell me that a team just down Tobacco Road from Chapel Hill is a much better defensive team than the Heels. (I don't use Duke as an example to patronize UNC fans, or because I'm a Blue Devils fan -- I'm not; rather, they're just a team that I've seen a few times this year that plays truly excellent defense).

I can see with my own eyes how Duke rotates on defense, how they defend ball screens extremely well, how their bigger guys like Kyle Singler take excellent angles when they are switched to smaller, quicker players, diverting guards away from the basket and into the teeth of the rest of the defense. It's similarly easy for me to see that these are all things that Carolina doesn't do well.

I don't want to focus too much on this season thus far, because the three times I've seen Carolina (vs. Davidson in Charlotte, vs. BYU in Vegas, and at Ohio St. tonight in Columbus) they've basically been without Ty Lawson (once because of early foul trouble, twice due to an ankle injury that limited him to two minutes against BYU and kept him out tonight against the Buckeyes, who, incidentally, haven't been able to throw the ball in the ocean in their last two outings). The jury is still very much out on this year's team, although it appears that Roy Williams -- Carolina's notoriously offensive-minded coach -- would agree that his team's defense isn't yet adequate (SI article).

But let's go back to last year, and to something the Basketball Prospectus article touches on:

"As seen above, I think part of that is simply due to the way they look
while they play. Another part, of course, is the speed at which they play. Roy Williams' teams, whether in Chapel Hill or in Lawrence, have always played fast. It's tougher to spot a good defensive team that plays fast, just as it's tougher to spot a bad defensive team that goes slow."

The Tar Heels do, indeed, play fast. And against many opponents, that is all the defense they need. Having played a little basketball myself (admittedly at the low high school and AAU level) and watched quite a bit more, I am very familiar with the negative effect that playing fast has on team's that aren't used to it. Suddenly in a hurry, teams get caught up in the tempo of the game, rushing shots and making poor passes.Where this strategy falls short -- and where I believe Ken Pom's stats are ultimately deceiving because they don't seem to take this into account -- is when Carolina (or any team whose main defensive weapon is pace) comes up against an opponent that plays at that pace itself, or an opponent with solid, experienced guards, or an opponent that plays fast and has solid, experienced guards. In those cases, the opposition's ballhandlers don't rush their shots and don't make bad decisions, because they're comfortable with the pace of the game.

This would go a long way to explaining many of Carolina's losses last year to teams with lesser offensive talent: Maryland, thanks to their athletic bigs and inability to score in the halfcourt, preferred a fast-paced game last year; Virginia Tech, to whom North Carolina lost twice, boasted a poised and experienced backcourt in seniors Jamon Gordon and Zabian Dowdell (Let's remember that Illinois, a team widely considered to be very sound defensively but that played at a relatively slow pace last year, had Tech completely flummoxed in last year's NCAA Tournament before a late run gave the Hokies the narrow first-round victory); and Gonzaga, which beat Carolina at Madison Square Garden in last year's Preseason NIT semifinals, had a deep, experienced backcourt that liked to get up and down the court as much as the Heels did.

My point is not that Carolina's defense isn't good enough to win games -- a lot of games -- in the ACC. I'm not saying they're like VMI, whose defensive strategy is seemingly to allow the opposition to make a two in order to get the ball back to shoot a three. The Heels have now, always have had, and always will have the size and athleticism to get by without being sound defensively just by playing fast. It's enough to beat the Georgia Techs and Wake Forests and Florida States all winter long, and put up good defensive numbers in doing so.

My point is that not all teams are like Tech and Wake and FSU, and that Carolina struggled against certain kinds of teams last year and will probably continue to this year unless something changes. There are teams that are comfortable playing at that pace, and if I had to choose a team to go up against them, I'd rather take one that has defensive qualities which I can point to and say "That's what makes them a good defensive team." Whenever someone tries to tell me that Carolina is very good defensively, they show me statistics. Those statistics are not going to beat Memphis in March. Sound defense will, and I haven't seen it from Carolina.