Title game proves defense wins championships
NCAA final might not be pretty as Virginia and Texas Tech square off.
MINNEAPOLIS — We are fortunate to live in an era of the most beautiful basketball ever played; an athletic spectacle that pleases the eye with end-to-end speed, freedom of movement and a generation of absurd shot creators who have changed the geometry of a 94-by-50-foot court.
Of course, if that’s what you want in Monday night’s NCAA national title game, you should probably look elsewhere. In college basketball this year, pace-and-space has been defeated by hold-and-hack.
The only thing certain about Texas Tech and Virginia playing for a championship is that it will be ugly, a game only the hardcores who appreciate defensive stances, crisp rotations and contested end-of-shot-clock jumpers could love.
In its own way, it might be entertaining. There is something oddly satisfying about the rigidity of Virginia basketball put under pressure, about how the hellacious Red Raiders make every cut, every pass, every rim attack so dang difficult by shrinking the court and snuffing out what opponents want to do.
But as basketball at nearly every level moves toward a style that intentionally opens up the court and welcomes made baskets, there is legitimate fear that Monday’s game will leave the college world asking a highly relevant question: Is this really the best we’ve got?
“I’ve watched a lot of Virginia games just as a fan,” Texas Tech coach Chris
Beard said. “From time to time, we’ll come into the office in the morning and somebody will be like, ‘Man, did you see that game? 11 points in the first half last night.’ Then we’ll run into the film room and watch some tape.”
At least that makes one of you. But given the current state of affairs in college basketball, where the most gifted NBA prospects tend to cluster at a small number of programs and barely get settled into their dorm rooms before it’s time to start draft prep, it’s no surprise coaches like Beard and Virginia’s Tony Bennett have taken a sledgehammer to the talent gap.
While today’s college players have grown up watching an evolved professional game that favors the most skilled teams, they enter a college environment where the court is tightly packed because of a shorter three-point line, officials allow lots of contact and defenders are allowed to clog the lane at their leisure because there’s no three-second rule that forces them to leave the paint.
Even its best, college basketball can be a slog to watch. And when you get teams like Virginia and Texas Tech that are so committed to offensive asphyxiation, a Final Four game can more closely resemble hand-to-hand combat than the sport being played by Steph Curry and Russell Westbrook.
Over the course of Saturday’s semifinals, nobody would have blamed you for watching a pair of future NBA lottery picks in Texas Tech’s Jarrett Culver and Virginia’s De’Andre Hunter and asking, “What’s the big deal about these guys?” because of how they were neutralized for such long stretches.
Though both eventually made an impact — Hunter with a run of eight points early in the second half and Culver with six in a row in crunchtime to redeem a 3-for-12 shooting performance — it could serve as Exhibit A for why these teams play that style to begin with.
Bennett, who played three seasons in the NBA, largely shunned those influences when he got into coaching because he saw firsthand how his father, Dick, turned Green Bay into a winner and get Wisconsin to the NCAA tournament for the first time in 47 years.
His so-called “pack line” defense, which is designed to force teams to play the game outside of an imaginary circle, is ideal when you don’t have the most talented players because it’s essentially a bet that the vast majority of college kids won’t be disciplined or skilled enough to figure it out.
“Defense can be an equalizer,” Bennett said. “At all levels not many teams advance without being strong defensively, even in the NBA. But that’s what I knew and I’ve seen it work and be successful, but that probably sealed it for me as I watched the success come.”
Texas Tech also wants to take away shots in the paint but gets there in a different way, with more of an attacking defense that will push ballhandlers back and angle them to the side with a variety of switches and traps designed to make people play faster than they want. The Red Raiders allow a scant 83.3 points per 100 possessions per Ken Pomeroy’s adjusted efficiency, making them perhaps the best defense we’ve ever seen in the analytics era.
“We have interchangeable parts,” Beard said. “We don’t have guys who are ones, twos, threes, four, fives defensively. That allows us to switch and guard different people and stuff like that, and we try to recruit to it.”
This isn’t meant to indict the stylistic choices of these two programs because, in the end, what they do defensively can win championships in the college game. Bennett and Beard are doing their jobs.
But new basketball frontiers are being opened regularly in the NBA, in Europe and even in the G-League, where a six-figure salary is being sold to top high school players as an alternative path to the pros.
Players like Zion Williamson will soon be allowed to enter the draft out of high school, continuing the talent drain out of future NCAA tournaments.
In reality, Virginia-Texas Tech probably isn’t a one-off but rather a preview of where the college game is headed.
The winner, of course, will find it beautiful.
The rest of us will see a sport being left behind.