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Message: [QUOTE="nelsonmuntz, post: 3332775, member: 833"] There are two aspect of the defense that were a problem on Wednesday: 1) Point of attack - Gilbert and Vital were getting chewed up off the dribble. This can be solved with focus and intensity. This definitely improved a lot against Florida. 2) Help and Rotations - I have complained in the past that I do not think the players understand Hurley's defensive rotations. Help on penetration is always really late, and the second rotation on the weakside is often non-existent. When the help is late, all it is doing is ending up in no man's land, not defending its own man, but not getting over in time to help on penetration either. If the help is a little late and the weakside rotation is slow, there could be two open shooters on the weakside. Watch a replay of any 5 minutes of the St. Joe's game and this was happening all night long. Watch the action away from the ball, and you will see 1 or more St. Joe's players literally undefended with no hope of a closeout for UConn. This is middle school AAU level stuff, and UConn has struggled with it going back to last year. The Help and Rotations issues are X's and O's, and something Hurley has to address. I have a suspicion that we haven't solved this. Florida, with a young team that hasn't played together much, didn't recognize the late arriving UConn help defense and had their own spacing issues on offense, and couldn't exploit this defensive weakness of UConn's. Florida has a bunch of highly skilled, superior athletes, and they tried to beat UConn 1 on 1 the whole night, and UConn dialed up its defensive intensity and was able to stop them. Can UConn stop a more passing oriented offense with good spacing and movement, like St. Joe's? We will see soon enough. [/QUOTE]

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