Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="Bone Dog, post: 4404531, member: 12088"] Another way to put this: you can’t win if your team can’t score. Some scoring will come from D — steals and turnovers that lead to runouts — but most of it will come from the half court sets the team runs. If a player can’t contribute effectively in the half court, this makes it hard for Geno to give her a lot of minutes in the 4th quarter of close games. But as true as this is, there’s two kinds of offensive players, one-on-one players and those who can score within a team passing scheme. Ideally, you have kids who can score on their own and can also make the team concept work. If the team concept falters, then merely playing deny defense on the one-on-one scorer can disrupt the offense. This is what we did to Iowa two years ago, assigning Christyn and Evina to contain Clark. There were other scorers on the team, to be sure, but containing Clark disrupted their offensive flow. It’s also what Baylor tried to do to Paige in the next game with DiDi Richards and what Arizona successfully did with Aari Macdonald. The unexpected thing, I think, is that successful team offense, as a state of mind, grows out of an intense focus on practicing team D. [/QUOTE]