There's No More Drastic Change Under Mark Pope than Ball-Screen Defense

Big Blue Nation saw and felt the difference in this iteration of Kentucky basketball on Tuesday night in the Champions Classic. Mark Pope picked up his first signature win in a way we didn’t think this team could, with defense.

Everything seemed to come easy for Duke in the first half. They scored 28 of their 40 points in the paint and shot just shy of 50% from the field.

They got most of the points with simple ball screens. When Cooper Flagg wanted a clean look at the rim, whoever Koby Brea was guarding set a ball screen. Kentucky switched and Flagg took it right to Brea to get to the rim through Brea.

This isn’t to lump all the blame on Brea. Kentucky was simply switching and it wasn’t working, deja vu all over again for Kentucky basketball fans.

Switching Everything is Too Simple

John Calipari gave Big Blue Nation plenty of grievances over the last five years of his tenure at Kentucky. Some mattered more to one individual than others. The lack of zone defense or out-of-bounds plays probably struck a chord with you. Personally, nothing Kentucky basketball did during the entirety of the John Calipari era was more infuriating than Kentucky’s ball-screen defense.

Kentucky switched everything, no matter what. That approach is one you take when playing pick-up basketball because it’s the easiest. It requires as little thought as possible to execute, even if your players can’t execute.

It worked for a while. That’s because Anthony Davis and Wille Cauley-Stein could guard anyone on the floor. When Kentucky didn’t have an alien defender at the 5, the ball-screen defense consistently created easy mismatches to exploit.

Mark Pope Breaks Down Ball-Screen Defense Adjustments

These are young adults who want to play professional basketball. They have the capacity to communicate and play various types of ball-screen defense, rather than simply switch everything. That’s exactly what Mark Pope did against Duke.

“I probably should’ve got a little more aggressive in the first half, but you’re just collecting data, right? You get a couple of data points and you’re not sure if adjustments are needed or it’s just anomalous. We got pulverized in transition, isolation, and in ball screens…,” Pope told Matt Jones on the KSR Postgame Show. “… So we knew we had to take a bunch of shots at being more aggressive, so we tried a bunch of stuff.”

That’s a vague way to put it. Pope dove even further into the details in his conversation with Tom Leach.

“Our ball screen defense was bad. It was a little over 1.5 points per possession on ball-screen defense. It was mostly the ball screen ball-handler just getting too deep. Our downs and weaks — we just needed to move the point. We needed to get our big up to the point. Their roll is such a threat because they’re so big. We were a little too zoned up and so our sprinter and cover was late. So what happened was their guards are really talented from six feet. We needed to make those same plays from eight and nine feet,” Pope said.

“We did that better in the second half. And we also changed it up a lot. We were pretty much the same look the whole first half. And then second half, we went to a bunch of blitzes on ball screens. We went to a bunch of switches on ball screens. Went to some unders, we went to some down-weak switch. And so we gave a much less constant, consistent look.”

Kentucky did not need to perfectly execute. All they needed to do was keep Duke guessing and keep the Blue Devils on their heels.

Pope made a correction at halftime and his team was prepared to execute the task. This team may not be filled with elite defenders, but their coach will put them in a position to succeed, even when they were athletically outmatched.