Part 2: (Offense and Defense) Blaming Sean Miller misses the point entirely
Editor’s Note: This is the second installment of a three part series on Arizona Basketball and Head Coach Sean Miller. In Part 1, we took a second look at what happened in Arizona’s 73-72 overtime loss to Oregon. In Part 2, we take a deeper dive into Miller’s offense and defense philosophy. In Part 3, we consider the 1-and-done athlete and Wildcat fan frustrations.
Miller and Arizona’s man-to-man defense
Zone defenses are gimmicky, designed to protect players who simply can’t play man-to-man defense. It’s notoriously used by teams that oftentimes don’t stack up against bigger, better teams. There’s a reason why the NBA is a man-to-man league, even though they now allow a modified, very limited version of zone defense looks. Jim Boeheim and Syracuse aside, the very best teams at the collegiate level predominately play man defense. When effective, a great college-level man defense will beat a team that plays zone defense. Even Scott Drew, famous for his 1-1-3 Zone defense for two decades now, actually has his Baylor Bears playing a true man-to-man defense this season. Why? Because they finally can. Baylor has the athletes, and their athletes are as good and as big as the Kansas’ of the world.
For fans to criticize Miller for not playing zone defense is ludicrous. Wildcat faithful will point to Lute Olson’s 1-1-3 Zone defense of yesteryear, but even Olson only went into that defense in times of desperation. Olson’ best teams never played zone because they did not have to. Find me a game when Lute Olson’s 1993-94 team played a zone defense for anything more than perhaps a special possession or two. The same can be said for Arizona’s 1997 national championship team, or the 2001 squad that reached the national title game. It did not happen.
Why this is important is many of Miller’s best Wildcats chose Arizona over other schools because parents and guardians knew that Miller would coach the player up on defense and ready them for the NBA. I’ve done the interviews myself. Aaron Gordon, Nick Johnson, Stanley Johnson, T.J. McConnell, Rondae Hollis-Jefferson, and Josh Green are just a few notables that come to mind. These Wildcats knew that learning man-to-man defense under Miller would better prepare them for a career in the NBA. Heck, even outsiders this year have noticed a steady improvement in Nico Mannion’s defense over the course of the season. This stuff matters to recruits and is a big reason why Miller is one of the elite recruiters in the college game.
If Miller were to suddenly start playing more zone defense, he would get a thank you letter and personal gift basket from every single coaching staff in the Pac-12.
Where fans may get confused, and it’s 100% understandable, is when watching opponents play a zone defense that is having success against Arizona. What fans are missing, however, is not seeing those same opponents actually play man-to-man defense against other teams they face the majority of the season. They play zone against Arizona to mask and protect against some obvious personnel mismatches. When they play teams of equal caliber, they’ll go man-to-man. The reason is because good offenses carve up zone defenses. Always have, always will.
If you don’t believe me, spend some time watching mid-majors play in conference. Fans of Power 5 schools usually only pay attention to these teams during the non-conference slate or the NCAA Tournament. During this period of time when the mid-majors live on the road and in the arenas of Power 5 schools, yes, they often resort to zone defenses to try and slow things down, protect their big men from foul trouble, and avoid getting into 1-on-1 situations against bigger athletes. However, during league play, the vast majority of these schools are manning up the opponent.
Miller and Arizona’s offense
There is nothing wrong with Arizona’s offense. Granted, it’s not a Roy Williams-designed early offense or a Lute Olson-designed motion offense with staggered double screens, but it’s not bad. If Arizona’s offense was truly sub-par, the team wouldn’t get open shots at the rim time and again. The reality is Arizona does get open shots. In fact, they get open shots all the time, sometimes with dynamically designed offensive sets that free a shooter for an absolutely wide open look at the basket. Like 90% of college players, the simple truth is most guys simply can’t shoot the basketball at this age under duress. As ridiculous as that sounds, the college game is more about teaching defense than it is about teaching offense. The reason is, at the high school level, these elite college players are so head-and-shoulders better than pretty much everyone on the court that they use the defensive end of the floor to catch their breath and get their legs back. If and when they have to recover defensively and flip their hands in to get a quick steal or elevate to block a shot of an average high school player with a 12-inch vertical jump, they’re elite quickness and jumping ability allows them to often do so with ease.
However, once these guys get to college, which is basically a collection of the very best high school basketball players in the world, suddenly defense matters and most stink at it on Day One in the program. Hence, as much as every coach wants to perfect their offense, the vast majority must spend every ounce of practice working on conditioning, defensive rebounding, and defensive sets, whether the focus is man-to-man or zone defense.
Sadly, there are only two ways to truly improve an offense. A coaching staff either has to solely recruit the very best offensive players in the country, or they need some of these elite high school athletes to actually stick around for more than one season. If they do stick around, good offensive players can actually become good defensive players and vice versa. If they bounce after a single season or two, a college head coach suddenly has to account for things an NBA coach doesn’t even have to think about in an incredibly limited amount of actual practice time and player development.
I’ll never forget sitting in the stands at a summer AAU event about 7-8 years ago. Seated alongside me, and willing to talk about anything I wanted, was current Harvard Head Coach Tommy Amaker. The former star point guard at Duke explained to me that the biggest thing for him at the college level was having to teach proper floor spacing in every single practice. This coming from a coach at Harvard where we can all safely assume that his players, at worst, are incredibly smart. We can also safely assume that none of them are 1-and-done student athletes. In short, if 'Harvard' is having to continuously work on something as simple as maintaining balanced floor spacing, then there is very little room for error for coaching staffs continually reshuffling rosters due to the 1-and-done rule and transfers.
Think about that for a second.
In the NBA, floor spacing is a given. You never see a 3-Point, spot up shooter on the low block in the NBA. Instead, they stay on the perimeter, creating SPACE for the big men and staying ready to knock down a 3-Point shot if and when the defense collapses off them too far.
In college, you see guards bumping into big men all the time in and around the paint. You also see big men standing around at the 3-Point line. It’s not as if these college coaches are teaching this nonsense. Instead, it’s simply understood that these young collegians simply don’t understand what good half-court offense looks like at this point in their careers.
Where it gets truly tough for college coaches is the fact that you MUST coach defense. The reason here is the one thing underclassmen do understand, having come up through AAU basketball, is how to score baskets in transition. AAU basketball is a run-and-gun environment where very few actually understand and practice true defensive fundamentals. Hence, a college coach is left focusing efforts on teaching these “1-and-done” student athletes how to defend rather than how to shoot. If they don’t, then you would see even more Arizona’s losing to more non-Power 5 programs that do feature rosters comprised of a majority of upperclassmen who have gelled together on offense and defense for years. These more experienced rosters, having grown up together in a system, simply understand the game better. They may not be better individual athletes, but they are better teams in terms of basketball skills and basketball science.
Everyone once in a blue moon, a coach like Miller, or Coach K, or Williams, or Calipari gets lucky and manages to retain a star player rather than prematurely losing them to the NBA Draft. Two very relevant examples are Arizona’s T.J. McConnell and current Oregon senior Payton Pritchard. Wildcat current freshman point guard Mannion has more upside and natural talent than both of these veteran college players. However, barring an unexpected run to the Final Four this year, both McConnell and Pritchard will have achieved more at the college level, in any single season at Arizona and Oregon, than Mannion likely will in what is anticipated to be his only season in Tucson.
Having now witnessed Pritchard rip the heart out of Arizona twice this year, his performances speak for itself. Looking back to McConnell, the Wildcat star who transferred into the program was a marginal scorer at best. Still, McConnell always seemed to make the right play for Arizona in big games, whether it was sinking a free throw, dishing out a well-timed assist, or knocking down one of those awkward looking jump shots he used to make when defenses sagged off a bit too much. Due to his experience, McConnell was literally an extension of Miller on the court.
When we consider Part 1 of this 3 Part series and think about a coaching staff not being able to jump on the court and sink a big free throw or grab a key defensive rebound, they basically can do this type of stuff with veteran players like McConnell and Pritchard because these experienced players, through dedication and repetition, indeed become coaches on the floor.
Part 3 of this series will publish on Friday. In Part 3, we consider the impact of the 1-and-done student athlete and how the 1-and-done departures play into fan frustration.