Prioritizing Facets of Halfcourt M2M Defense

I read a great article on this site about only being able to be good at 3-4 things and spending 90% or so of your practice time on those 3-4 areas.

I chose halfcourt defense, halfcourt offense and rebounding.

Let's break it down even further...As 1 of 3, we still have limited time to work on our halfcourt defense. What are the top 3-4 facets of halfcourt defense that we should 90% of our time on?

Some examples would be...

Ball pressure
Close-outs
helpside
Screen defense
Dribble penetration
Defending cutters
Post Defense

Thank you

I know you're not supposed to answer a question with a question but...

- What are the things that happen the most often in half court defense?

- What type of defense will you run (pressure, pack it in, etc)?

- What are the goals of your defense?
(For example, the goals of my defense are to stop them from scoring by keeping the ball as far from the basket as possible. If our goal was to cause havoc and turnovers, our emphasis in practice would be different.)

Hi Coach Haefner,

They shouldn't be, but those are kind of tricky questions. We use basically one m2m defense with two variations; packed in one pass away and on the line, up the line one pass away. We use the first against dribble penetration teams to protect the "house"/lane and the latter vs. jumpshooting teams to make them driblble, speed them up and get them to play backwards. Otherwise they are essentially the same with heavy ball pressure, deep help position etc. We do go under vs. over ball screens in our packed in version.

Thanks,

Coach B

I like that philosophy......

My first priority would be ball pressure, then one pass away, then help defense.
Post defense and rebounding
Defending screens
Close outs

JMO

Oh good, I'm on the right track!

Thanks Coach Sar!

Question on perimeter defense one pass away...

I teach one long step inside the 3 point line for our pack-line m2m. I don't have a rule for our on the line, pressure version, but I'm thinking one long step above the 3 point line. The goal is to get the opponent to play backwards, no ball reversal etc, but I think we get over-extended sometimes and the driving lanes are huge. Thoughts?

Coach B -

Coach B wrote:I teach one long step inside the 3 point line for our pack-line m2m. I don't have a rule for our on the line, pressure version, but I'm thinking one long step above the 3 point line. The goal is to get the opponent to play backwards, no ball reversal etc, but I think we get over-extended sometimes and the driving lanes are huge. Thoughts

Playing pack style or our match up, we talked about a triangle... seeing man and ball looking straight ahead.... AS for ON the LINE .... think about this... the two offensive players.... roll a ball between them.... that is the LINE and we wanted our hand in the passing lane. looking for deflections or steals.

[quote="Coach B"]but I think we get over-extended sometimes and the driving lanes are huge. Thoughts?
Question on perimeter defense one pass away...

Thats where the UP the LINE comes in to play... we wanted to be maybe half way between the two players, that way,all we had to do was open up and get a hand towards the ball, preventing an open lane... sometimes we had them fake towards the ball and then recover.

Here is something else we did when we were experiencing the same problems you are. From the POINT ... we had the defender pressure the ball to the FT line extended, that way the kids had a fram of reference..... from the WING, we wanted to force thall to the SHORT CORNER and shut the Offensive player off.

I hope this is clear.

Hi Coach Sar,

When using on the line defense, I refer to it as the "perimeter line" which refers to how far out are we willing to stay on the ball to player line with a hand. Right now we have no guideline and I was thinking of limiting it to one long step out side the 3 point line so we don't get over extended.

I also teach one-third of the way up the line one pass away, maybe I should adjust it to half way?

Thank you

Coach B -

Whatever you are comfortable with AND works for you.....

Coach B wrote:I also teach one-third of the way up the line one pass away, maybe I should adjust it to half way?

I would move that player closer to the ball, that will prevent penetration.

I will make the adjustment.

Thanks Coach Sar!

Good luck Coach, let us know how it goes.