I’m a HUGE Cleveland Cavaliers fan. The 2024-2025 season was amazing. The Cavs went 64-18 and had four double-digit winning streaks. They swept the Heat in the first round of the playoffs. They looked poised for a Finals run.

Which is exactly why the second round of the 2025 playoffs was so devastating. The Cavs entered their series with the Pacers as huge favorites. Five games later, it was “1, 2, 3, Cancun” for Cleveland.

Why? One main reason was that the Cavs couldn’t handle the relentless back-court pressure of the Indiana Pacers. They hounded the Cavs 94 feet, forced bad passes, pushed the pace, and wore down players like Ty Jerome, Darius Garland & Donovan Mitchell. There were extended periods of games where the Cavs weren’t initiating offense until there were fewer than 10 seconds on the shot clock.

Not only did it wear the Cavs down on offense, it also affected their defense. Because they were expending so much energy on the offensive end, their defensive effort suffered. The result was transition layups and wide-open 3’s for the Pacers. 

What the Pacers did to the Cavs is what Mentor (Oh) Coach Bob Krizancic has being doing to Ohio teams for decades with The 7 Second Quick Strike System, on his way to amassing over 700 wins.

His tenacious pressure defense system, paired with an unrelenting transition offense, has produced 2 Ohio State Championships and resulted in his teams leading the state of Ohio in scoring 7 times! Now you can use that same system to get similar results.

The NBA Trend You Shouldn’t Ignore

According to a recent article on The Ringer, full-court pressure in the NBA has increased significantly. Two-thirds of teams are pressing more than last season, resulting in more turnovers and higher scoring output for the teams applying the pressure.

Pacers Coach Rick Carlisle summed it up: “If you’re playing defensively full court, you’re speeding the game up and getting a team to play faster than they like.”

If pro teams are leaning in and ramping up the pressure, that’s a signal for the rest of us: the same principles apply at lower levels, and probably even more so, since the players we coach against don’t have nearly the same ability as NBA players.

3 Reasons You Should Emulate The NBA Pressing Trend

1. It wears opponents down

Younger players often struggle with conditioning, decision-making under fatigue, and handling constant pressure. When you apply full-court pressure, you make the opponent work every possession.

This takes a mental and physical toll. Physically, every advancement of the ball requires extreme effort. Mentally, ball handlers must maintain 100% focus on every dribble. Over the course of a game, that fatigue multiplies, just as it does for NBA teams.

2. It creates turnovers and easy offense

When you pressure, trap, deny, rotate hard, and sprint back, you increase the chance of steals, deflected passes, and poor inbound entries.

Every turnover is an opportunity for a quick bucket. As Coach Bob Krizancic says in The 7 Second Quick Strike System, his teams are looking for two 6-10 point runs a game. That’s enough to swing almost every game in their favor. The turnover created by pressure lead to easy buckets and momentum-changing runs. In that way, your defense makes every player on your team better offensively, because it creates higher-percentage shots.

That’s gold for player confidence and team growth.

3. It levels the playing field if you lack depth or talent

Many of you may not have high-end offensive talent. That can make scoring in the half-court a real struggle. Let pressing be a solution.

It allows you to set the terms of the game: pace, pressure, possessions. You can hide weaknesses, amplify your strengths, and force the opponent to beat you in uncomfortable ways. Additionally, pressing creates natural offensive advantages that enable players who aren’t uber-talented to score.

When you pair your offensive and defensive systems together like Coach Krizancic, you get a double benefit - you are always playing “offense.” Even when you are on defense, you are dictating to your opponent.

Then, when you have the ball, you attack with zero lag. Your opponent never gets a chance to catch their breath, creating an aggressive and attacking identity that allows you to outperform your talent level.

Conclusion

I’ve always been a huge fan of pressing. But even I was skeptical that it could work at the highest levels. I always bought into the idea that the players were just too good.

Watching that Cavs-Pacers series shifted that paradigm for me.

Pressing imposes your will on your opponent - forcing decisions, forcing speed, forcing fatigue, forcing turnovers.

If the NBA teams are doing it, so should you, and possibly even harder. Because at your level, pressing younger players with less experience means more mistakes, more fatigue, more turnovers, and more easy buckets for you.

To learn more about how you can use pressure to take your team to the next level, check out The 7 Scoring System with Bob Krizancic!

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