Why don't teams run a press defense?

The Blazers are not small. The Blazers are not weak. They crush their enemies, see them driven before them, and hear the lamentations of their women.

Until his players told him he had to stop.

Coaches don’t rule the NBA, they are never as highly paid as their best players, and those guys don’t want to hump it all over the court for 82 regular season games plus the playoffs.

Basically, in the NBA teams only press if they really need the ball back immediately, and most players are conditioned to foul if they don’t get it (because in those situations, if they don’t get the steal they foul).

Nuff said

1. The higher the level you get, the worse the press works. See, pressing skill doesn’t improve with age really, but ball handling skill does. A 12 year old dribbling a ball is a lot slower than a 12 year old not dribbling the ball. An NBA player dribbling can move nearly as fast in the open court as someone not dribbling. Yes, there are examples of the press working well at the college level, but these examples are rare and the pressing team typically has skillful players anyway.

2. The season is 82 games. Pressing twice a week for 16 weeks might be feasable. Pressing 3.5 games a week for 5 months is not feasable. There is enough wear and tear on the players… just imagine if they were moving twice as much each game.

3. The NBA press leads to a lot of layups. Watch the end of games when a team is forced to press. As often as not the opponent finds an open player for a layup/dunk and this is WITHOUT the offensive team scouting the press. If you tried a press from minute 1, by minute 3 the coach would be calling a timeout with a way to beat it.

They ain’t shooting from any farther. It’s a lot of effort for not much return, better to play the passing lanes and set up good position.

The press doesn’t work against the superior athletes that are in the NBA.

and most of them are really easy to execute.

just like the triple option doesnt work in the NFL. The press may work in surprise situations, but it would not be effective for a long period of time, especially for 48 minutes. NBA pgs have adequate ball handling ability to beat the press. The larger dimensions of the court make it much too hard for the defense to contain the players as they have a lot of space to maneuver around.

so i don’t always trust him

when Greg Anthony and Stacey Augmon were implementing it. The press can be an effective weapon when used expertly and somewhat randomly, or when the opposing team does not have its best ball handlers on the court. I think Nic and possibly Jerryd might be effective at times. Wonder if we’ll see it? Probably not, as McMillan is apparently less experimentally inclined than Dunleavy.

I read the Gladwell piece as well and I found it very interesting. I think it’s too facile to watch young girls’ basketball and immediatley announce that NBA teams should run the press.

But I also think the majority of resondents commit the classic error of merely repeating dogma and platitude and calling that learning. Taking advantage of bleating dogma is exactly what made Billy Beane and Theo Epstein successful in baseball, it is what made Bill Walsh successful in football (inventor of the “West Coast Offense,” and it is part of the advanced metrics being used in basketball.

Case in point: the excellent post on how LA Lakers don’t care who brings the ball up—be it PG or someone else—despite what dogma says about the need for a PG.

The point of Gladwell’s piece, and I agree with him, is that space is not properly used on the basketball floor. He is quite correct in saying that virtually the entire court is surrendered by the defnese until (roughly) the 3 pt line.

Could there be a better way to use that space? I seem to recall that hallowed Blazers of Addleman’s years using the press effectively. I recall Reggie Miller scoring something like 32 pts in 9 seconds based upon trapping defense. Nellie-ball may yet prove successful.

So while I agree that the press is probably inappropriate for 82 games and NBA stars with ice in their ears, don’t so easily dismiss the concept of innovation in the defensive space on the basketball floor. Here, there is a lot of room for improvement.

I, personally, would love to see the Blazers try some outrageous and new methods of playing basketball to the befuddlement of the rest of the league.

People are enamored of the press because Wooden’s teams used it to dominate the Pac-8 for a decade. Ralph Miller used it too. Eventually, teams became better fundamentally and the press became easier to deal with and fell away as a defensive weapon.