Kentucky emphasizing more aggression with pick-and-roll defense

Kentucky’s defense wasn’t anywhere close to perfect against Mississippi State, but anyone who follows the Wildcats this season knows that it was at least a step in the right direction.

During Wednesday night’s win, Kentucky held the Bulldogs to 77 points, a vast improvement from the 97 points allowed in last weekend’s loss to Texas A&M. Again, it wasn’t perfect, considering Mississippi State still shot nearly 45 percent from the field and only turned the ball over nine times.

But Kentucky’s defense doesn’t need to be perfect this season for a deep run in March — it just needs to be good enough. UK’s offense currently leads the nation in points per game at 90.8. That alone can take you far if the defense is just barely average.

Against Mississippi State, the ‘Cats poured in 90 points for the third straight game while the defense was good enough to keep the Bulldogs from ever seriously challenging Kentucky. So what changed? Head coach John Calipari described it as an “adjustment” with the pick-and-roll defense (even though all I heard was “tweak”).

“We made a little bit of adjustment in our pick-and-roll defense, executive decision,” Calipari said after the win. “They liked it. I liked it. And now we are going to really zero in on getting really good at it.”

Now, what exactly was the adjustment Calipari made? I’m glad you asked. Both Calipari and fifth-year guard Antonio Reeves described it as being more aggressive and getting up faster to the opposing ball handler once he tries to get around the impending screen.

“We definitely played with grit and aggressiveness out there,” Reeves said of the pick-and-roll defense. “We definitely pushed up on the man and didn’t let them try to bully us on the screen. We definitely emphasized that in the last couple practices before we played.”

“We were a little more aggressive. But we’ve got work to do,” Calipari added.

Looking back at the film, there definitely appeared to be a more concerted effort from Kentucky when facing the pick-and-roll. The bigs — Aaron Bradshaw and Ugonna Onyenso, and to some extent, Tre Mitchell — were more frequently and more aggressively getting into the face of Mississippi State players out of a pick-and-roll. There was less dropping back into coverage and more attacking the ball handler.

Oftentimes, this allowed Kentucky to essentially trap the ball, forcing an MSU player into an awkward pass, to pick up his dribble, or even into a turnover.

“We practiced for two days on defense,” Bradshaw said. “Trying to get better on defense because we all know we’re a really good offensive team and we’ve been slacking on defense. So we just had to pick the defense up.”

KSR’s Brandon Ramsey noticed all of this too and talked about it further in his “Watch the Tape” breakdown, outlining several examples of it working to perfection on Wednesday night. I picked out a couple of the few plays he didn’t cover in his article to help drive home the point even more.