After watching Indiana blitz Marquette and Milwaukee with back-to-back 14 of 28 efforts from beyond 3-point arc, any coach worth his salt wasn’t about to play straight-up man defense and chase IU’s shooters through a mesmerizing array of movement and screens for 40 minutes.
Credit Incarnate Word and Lindenwood for being the first to figure that out.
Lindenwood has some respectable length and athleticism, and rather than chase they switched. The result was like kryptonite to Indiana’s then seemingly dynamic offense.
There were clues switching might be effective the game prior when Incarnate Word forced IU into a 5 of 24 shooting effort from three by playing primarily zone.
And as Lindenwood passed off the players IU was screening for from one defender to the next, it became clear the Hoosiers weren’t nearly effective against a switching defense either. A fast and fluid offense suddenly seemed stagnant.
After breaking 100 back-to-back against Marquette and Milwaukee, IU averaged 71 against Incarnate Word and Lindenwood.
A bit stunned after watching what seemed like an unstoppable offense look rather pedestrian against Lindenwood, I asked head coach Darian DeVries for his thoughts on playing against a switching defense.
“That’s something we’re putting a lot more time into because it’s not how we play defense, so what we’ve done all summer and fall, even though we worked on it at times, when we go against each other we’re working on ourselves,” DeVries said.
“It’s something the last couple days I thought we did a really good job in our practices of really exploiting some of that switching. It didn’t have maybe as good of carryover as we would’ve liked, but something I know that we’ll continue to get better and better at as we see it more.”
Not every coach will play zone, but they’ve all got some variation of switching concepts.
And while they’ve had their moments, Indiana has never really had an answer for switching defense. And that has probably been more due to a lack of the right kind of personnel rather than a lack of ingenuity. While setting screens to create open threes is a strength for these Hoosiers, playing against a switching defense requires attributes they lack.
DeVries has stated openly that, beyond Tayton Conerway, the team lacks players who are elite at winning one-on-one dribble drives. That comes in real handy against switching, especially when favorable mismatches are created by said switching.
And the Hoosiers lack the elite length and athleticism that could also create advantages both due to mismatches created by switches, and the plethora of back cuts and dives to the rim that open up against switching.
Of course game planning is a copycat business, at least for coaches willing to stray from their preferred style, and once IU posted some film struggling against switching, the Hoosiers have gone through some rough patches within games where their offense seems to be stuck in the mud.
It hasn’t always been pure 1 through 5 switching, but some degree of switching, zone, or shell principles that mimic a zone have often stymied this Indiana team. Sometimes it has just been a matter of opponents hugging up to IU’s shooters and forcing the Hoosiers to win another way. This roster is wired to hunt threes, and creating open looks on a sustained basis has been challenging. And that has often led to prolonged scoring droughts that have cost Indiana games.
The droughts have typically come later in games, after teams have seen how IU will try to attack their defense, or the opponent decides to change into switching concepts. As he did following the Northwestern loss, DeVries has often pointed to a stagnant offense that lacked movement as the culprit during these droughts.
Here’s a recap of IU’s 11 losses:
- At Minnesota IU didn’t make a shot from the field for an 8:38 stretch that spanned halftime against zone and switching defense. A seven-point IU lead become a two-point deficit. IU also didn’t make a shot from the field in the final two minutes of the game.
- Louisville’s 16-0 start against IU was fueled by very aggressive straight up man defense. But it did show that the physicality, length and athleticism would be a challenge for the Hoosiers as well. Hard hedges on ball screens also had an impact.
- At Kentucky IU made one field goal in a more than seven-minute second half span against switching that led to a seven-point lead becoming an eight-point deficit.
- Against Nebraska IU scored one-point in a more than five-minute late second half stretch that led to a six-point lead becoming a nine-point deficit.
- At Michigan State IU went nearly seven minutes without scoring in the second half, and a tie game became a 17-point deficit.
- Against Iowa IU went more than nine minutes without a second half field goal, and a six-point Hawkeye lead become 20.
- At Michigan the story was similar to Louisville, where the Hoosiers were just overmatched at the start and fell into an immediate 19-4 hole, never to recover.
- At USC was never really about switching or scoring droughts. IU simply shot 10 of 35 from three and wasn’t very good defensively.
- At Illinois IU went more than four minutes without scoring in the first half, and a one-point lead became a nine-point hole. And then IU opened the second half with one field goal in the first eight minutes, and a seven-point deficit became 16.
- Purdue had defensive success in the second half of the first meeting vs. Indiana and picked up where it left off. At Purdue, Indiana was bad offensively from the start. They made one shot in the first 4:42 of the game, and just two in the first 7:44.
- And vs. Northwestern, Indiana missed 11 straight shots and went more than 10 minutes without a field goal in a second half where they gave away an 11-point lead.
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