Lamont Paris calls for better defensive discipline from South Carolina

South Carolina fell at home to Georgia earlier in the week, but the loss led to some detailed X’s and O’s breakdown from Gamecock head coach Lamont Paris in the postgame.

He was particularly irked by what he considered “uncharacteristic” mistakes on the defensive end of the basketball against the Bulldogs, especially when it came to how his team handled screens.

“Just discipline. Like, in a scenario, if I’m supposed to chase over the top of a screen, then I need to chase over top of the screen versus going under the screen,” Paris said. “There’s always going to be a point where — let’s say you pick up the screen late, you identify that the screen is coming late — at that point, you have a decision to make to go under or to go over.

“Under is risky but it’s easier and so we went under and then we paid the price because they would shoot it and make it. That happened twice at least that I know of.”

That wasn’t his only complaint when it came to screens. Paris highlighted a couple instances of poor screen defense that led to fouls on sophomore Zachary Davis.

“And just a multitude of some other things that just were uncharacteristic,” Paris continued. “Like, I don’t have to tell you not to do that thing, right? There are a couple of fouls, you know, Zach runs through a screen and it’s two free throws. He did it two times and it wasn’t making an attempt to get around the screen.”

Davis wasn’t alone, and Lamont Paris says he still needs to watch the tape to evaluate everything he noticed live, but either way, South Carolina simply committed too many defensive errors against a hot Georgia team.

“I mean, I’ll look at it on film and see if it corroborates what I think, but he ran right through the guy on the one in front of our bench, and so that’s two free points. In a game like this, how about having those two free points back? So just, double figures times that stuff like that happened, double figures at least,” Paris said.

The Gamecocks will surely learn from that double-figure list of miscues against UGA. Meanwhile, Paris provided some interesting and detailed insight into a particular are of the game with his screen defense breakdown.