Half a Good Plan (Duke-UMD)

My Terrapins lost to the hated Dukies yesterday, 96-88. I’d be more down, but they actually played pretty well– they just aren’t that good a team this year, and Duke is better than they are. They gave a great effort, though, and might’ve had a chance if they’d had more than half of the right game plan.

On offense, they had exactly the right idea of how to attack Duke. Nik Caner-Medley came out and went right at JJ Redick, who isn’t a great on-ball defender, and Maryland concentrated on scoring inside, which is Duke’s weakness year in and year out (generic office pool tip: When you’re filling out your bracket, pick Duke to lose to a good team from the Big East or Big Ten– Krzyzewski’s a great coach, but he recruits a specific type of team every year, and they’re always vulnerable to a sustained, physical inside game). At halftime, Maryland had only attempted something like 5 three-point shots, and led the “points in the paint” stat 28-14.

They didn’t execute quite as well as they should’ve– Maryland’s inside player just aren’t up to snuff this year, and they dropped too many passes, and missed too many shots. They also couldn’t out-rebound my 80-year-old grandmother. But they had the right idea on offense, and didn’t do a bad job putting the plan into practice.

The real problem was on defense, where they had exactly the wrong plan. They committed to stopping JJ Redick, at the expense of leaving other guys open. Redick was double-teamed a lot, and other shooters were more or less left alone to take as long as they liked to line up their shots.

Predictably, this was a dismal failure. They didn’t even do that well at stopping Redick, who ended up with 35. But what killed them was daring Greg Paulus to shoot, and giving him all day to do it. He’s not a complete chump, guys. If you give him ten seconds to look at the basket, he will hit the open twenty-footer.

I understand the macho “we’re not going to let one guy beat us” thing, but it’s stupid (and also one of Gary Williams’s signature weaknesses as a coach). Especially because he’s probably not going to beat you– he’s a great scorer, but not that great. And if he’s going to go for eighty, well, then at least you’re a footnote to history.

The way to defend Duke– particularly since Maryland has DJ Strawberry, who is a very good individual defender– is to accept that Redick will get his points, and keep the other four from beating you. Because the other four guys they put on the court are eminently stoppable. Yeah, yeah, Shelden Williams scores a bunch of points, but look how he gets them– he gets a lot of open looks and stick-backs when his man leaves to pick up Redick or somebody else, and he gets a lot of points on the fast break, because he runs the floor as well as any big man in the nation. In the half-court set, though, he’s not the sort of player who can dominate by creating his own shot in the post– one of the few times that he tried, he turned it over on a five-second call, because he didn’t have any idea what to do with the ball. And this is working against Will Bowers and Ekene Ibekwe, who aren’t exactly Chamberlain and Russell.

Duke’s loss to Georgetown is a good model to follow– Redick scored forty-odd, and nobody else did a damn thing. The sports pundits all talk like that was an accident, a fluke bad game by six guys, but I don’t think so (I didn’t see the game, so I can’t be sure)– I think it’s an indication of what you need to do to stop Duke.

Anyway, that’s pretty much your game in a nutshell. Maryland had the right offensive plan, and executed it pretty well, and they had the wrong defensive plan, and excuted that pretty well, too. So they lost. At least they managed to fire up for the game, and put forth a consistent effort all game– if they can only maintain that, they might be able to sneak back into the NCAA field this year. I’m not holding my breath, though.