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Message: [QUOTE="Bone Dog, post: 5191610, member: 12088"] Teams that play the "swarming" defense people mention inevitably make compromises. The question is whether we can capitalize on those compromises. [B]That's the potential we have to play up to.[/B] The girls are big enough and quick enough and strong enough. They have good enough basic skills. The issue is whether their chemistry is good enough. This is also sometimes referred to as 'moving without the ball' on offense. If you play in your face defense to stop a shooter, you risk getting beat off the dribble and require help from another defender. To pull this off, the team's defensive rotation has to be crisp and well-coordinated. A great passer, like Paige, can burn teams that play this sort of defense if they make any mistakes in their rotations. Geno's motion offense is specifically designed to induce such mistakes -- that's the point of the seemingly aimless passing and rotating on offense. [Geno did a whole series of videos on this a few years back] However, if Paige beats an overly aggressive defender, it only matters if her teammates move appropriately to take full advantage of her movement. Azzi and Sarah know how to do this. KK and Ash too, most of the time. The others, not so much, though Kaitlyn seems to have figured this out of late. USC played aggressive defense against us, and it worked in the first half -- we didn't capitalize on the mistakes in their rotations. It didn't work in the second half because we started making them pay for those mistakes, and we applied the same sort of defense to them. I think something similar was also visible in the Tennessee game. We didn't lose that one because they forced a lot of turnovers. We lost both of them because our intensity level faltered in the second half. Ideally, as each of Geno's lineups develops 'chemistry' we can play this defense better, and respond to it better when other teams try to do it to us. It looked like we were making good progress in developing that chemistry early on, and then got slightly disrupted by little injuries to Paige and Azzi, and the time it has taken Aubrey return. And now this injury to Ice is a major disruption to that development. I think it is pretty clear that Morgan and Allie are not yet fully integrated into the defensive and offensive schemes, though they don't make the worst mistakes anymore. And even Q has come a long way in both departments, though her intensity level comes and goes. It is testimony to Sarah's great court awareness (we used to call this court savvy, before the ugly phrase BB IQ took its place) that she figured out her various roles in a few different lineups by the middle of December. This never ceases to amaze me about her. And KK and Ash seem to be fully integrated into several lineups and make very few mistakes and always bring great intensity to every game. We might well ask how many lineups Geno runs in a typical game. Each one needs to have its own chemistry. Sure, the starters have gotten lots of minutes and have chemistry. But what about the 6 or 7 variants on the starting lineup that get minutes in the first half? Is their chemistry all equally developed? I think the answer is probably 'no.' But it looks to me like they're coming along. [B]Playing to our potential means maximizing the chemistry of all the various lineups.[/B] Morgan gets 1st half minutes, and this suggests she's performing well in practice, well enough for Geno to overlook the mistakes she makes. Allie does not get 1st half minutes, and we can all fill in the blanks on that. Jana gets some minutes throughout games, but not as many as some here (including me) would like to see. We all have our pet theories on this. But whatever is going on behind the scenes, it looks like Jana is making progress in learning to make switches on defense, on boxing out, on making cuts on offense, all of which are key to playing to our potential. A month ago, Jana was not able to make a cut to receive a pass and finish with a layup. Now she's begun to do this. We have yet to see her master rolling to the basket after setting a screen and finishing with a layup. Sarah does this almost instinctively. I'm sure it's not that Jana doesn't have the basic skills to do these things. But at this level, timing is everything, and she doesn't seem to have mastered this yet. My conclusion from all of this is that playing to our potential may have little to do with anything Paige is or is not doing. I suspect it is much more about the rest of the team. On offense, she uses her perimeter shot, her dribble-drive penetration, her midrange jumper, and her brilliant passing off the dribble to make this team win. But all of these things require her teammates to behave in ways she can count on. Some of them do this very well, others are still growing into this symbiosis. I expect Geno & Co are working very intensely on building the chemistry we need, and we catch glimpses of it in the conference wins, and even in our losses. For example, in yesterday's game Jana chased down a long rebound into the corner to beat out a Providence player. She could do this because she's feeling strong, but also because she knew she wouldn't be out of position once she got the ball. I'm sure this insight took a lot of experience, and as a result she didn't hesitate when she might have a month ago. [/QUOTE]

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