It’s The Defense, Stupid

If you ask me what the biggest advantage of the new breed of basketball statistics is the answer is clear — they can shake up the conventional wisdom. While your eyes may miss some trend, the numbers can point you in the direction of the real problem to be solved. They can prove the Around The Horn talking heads definitively wrong (well, maybe you don't need stats for that). That is why the big names of the movement — Dean Oliver, Dan Rosenbaum, among others — have jobs with NBA teams. In a highly competitive NBA, executives don’t need someone telling them what everyone else is saying. They need smart minds seeking the elusive truth.

There may be no better example of what statistics can show you — and how that information combines with observation to point a new direction — than looking at Team USA. Which is convenient as that squad starts practice heading into the FIBA Americas championship (and Olympic qualifying tournament) in Las Vegas, with the first USA game (against Venezuela) on August 22.

After the USA national basketball team lost to Greece and eventually came home with a bronze medal from the World Championships in Japan last summer, the cries from newspaper columnists and radio talk show hosts nationwide were pretty uniform — the players play too much one-on-one, lack fundamentals and they can’t shoot from the outside. Poor outside shooting got the most votes as the team’s biggest problem on an ESPN.com poll. All this echoed “the sky is falling” comments on USA basketball for the last decade.

But look at the statistics and something else jumps out at you — defense. And the fact that Team USA didn’t play much of it.

Before they faced Greece in the semi-finals in Japan, Team USA had an offensive rating of 129.2 points per 100 possessions. (If you want to understand this better, or understand why points per possession are a better measure of a team than points per game, this is the best place to start. As a side note, some of these numbers come from Dan Rosenbaum and others on the APBR message boards at the time of the tournament last summer.)

To put that offensive number in context, the best offensive team last NBA season was the run-and-gun Phoenix Suns, who scored 116.1 points per 100 possessions, a pace that team USA was 13 points ahead of. Within the World Championships, the USA’s offensive rating was a whopping 9.1 points per 100 possessions better than the next best teams (Spain and Argentina).

Even in the loss to Greece, the USA had an offensive rating of 128.1 points per 100 possessions and scored 95 points, which is plenty to win.

But only if you can stop the other team from scoring.

Against Greece, Team USA’s defensive rating 136.2 (points per 100 possessions).  Coming into that game, against considerably lesser competition, the USA had a defensive rating of 98.4 (points per 100), which was seventh best in the entire tournament and worst of the final four.

But stats without observation are a limited tool (something as true in areas as varied as economics to basketball). And observation of what happened with the Team USA defense shows a path to fixing the problem this summer — and before next summer’s Olympics. But not an easy one.

If you remember the game against Greece, in the first half the Greeks tried a variety of offensive plays against the USA, but by the second half, they figured out the USA could not defend the pick-and-roll particularly well. Especially if the other three players stood out by the three-point line (their USA defenders followed them, opening up the lane). So Greece ran it. Every play in the second half. Literally. And the USA never really stopped it.

Now, if you watch any NBA basketball, you know that defending the pick-and-roll is something virtually every team outside of San Antonio struggles doing. It’s what teams ran against Shaq’s championship Lakers squads because Shaq defended it about as well as he shot free throws. But defending the pick-and-roll in International ball is even more challenging because — unlike most NBA teams — the players off the ball are moving as well. The motion in the offense makes defensive rotations that much more challenging. And Greece kept moving.

The Greeks had another advantage — the guy running that pick-and-roll. Point guard Theodoros Papaloukas (who numerous NBA teams covet and went after this past summer) didn’t wilt under pressure — Greece had just four turnovers all game. And the USA had an entire defensive strategy based on pressure.

From the first game of the championships in Japan, Mike Krzyzewski and his coaching staffs told their players to play a high-pressure defense. It works well for his Duke teams, and it worked well in the early going of the Worlds — in the game against Puerto Rico the USA had 14 steals, against China it was 21. And the rest of the pool play was pretty similar. All those steals lead to a lot of fast breaks and easy baskets at the other end — especially when you have guys who can finish the break like LeBron James and Dwyane Wade. Team USA is athletic, they should run. And they did — the USA averaged 98.4 possessions per game in Japan, by far the fastest pace in that country last summer outside the bullet train.

But what happens when the USA runs into a team with a true professional point guard (and other ball handlers), one athletic and savvy enough not to succumb to that pressure defense? Well, if you don’t have good fallback options, Greece happens.

The problem is that while the USA has athletes, building the team trust and system knowledge needed for good defensive rotations takes some time. And just like they are doing this summer before Vegas, last year Team USA had just a couple weeks of practice before taking on the best in the world. San Antonio didn’t build their defense overnight, and neither can the USA.

One thing that would help is something Team USA under Jerry Collangelo is trying to do — bring back as many players year to year as possible. You can question how well that is going, but having LeBron and Carmelo Anthony back — plus adding quality perimeter defenders like Chauncey Billups and Kobe Bryant — hopefully means a better defense in Vegas. And, if they come back, it gives the team a baseline of understanding heading into next year.

What I also hope to see this summer is some zone defense. Against the majority of teams in the world (and all but one or two in the Americas tournament this summer) the overwhelming athleticism of Team USA playing pressure, gambling defense will be more than enough. The turnovers will make up for the easy lay-ups surrendered. But against the best in the world there needs to be a fallback, and a good zone would be a key weapon against team with good penetrating wingmen.

The thing is, this summer in Vegas may not be a great test. The talent at the Americas tournament is unimpressive — Brazil should be pretty good, Argentina is traditionally good but they will be without their best players (Ginobili, Nocioni, Oberto, Sanchez) and after that things really drop off. I guess Team USA can no longer look past the Puerto Ricos of the world, but they should be able to beat them. They key will be the Sept. 1 semi-final game, something Team USA should be in and needs to win — do so and they get one of the two automatic Olympic berths up for grabs in Vegas. Of course, the USA has not fared all that well in these one-and-done games in recent years.

Still, against this group Team USA might be able to earn that berth just with an overwhelming offense. But if Team USA is seriously on a three-year quest to bring Olympic Gold back to the nation that invented the game, there needs to be defensive improvement, too.