Why South Carolina switched from man to 1-3-1 defense in win over Arkansas
More times than not this season, Lamont Paris hasn’t been afraid of change. If something isn’t working, he’s going to do something different to get the result he wants.
And with Arkansas leading by three with just over two minutes to go in the first half, Paris went to what he knew might work. After playing in a man defense for the first 18 minutes, South Carolina switched to the 1-3-1 zone defense.
“I think coach just wanted to throw something different at them and throw them off a little bit,” Ta’Lon Cooper said. “Seeing man for almost a whole half, they thinking, ‘Oh, they’re probably going to keep going with man,’ and then you throw something different at them. It messes with their minds. I think coach was just playing chess with them, trying to see what that was going to do.”
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Paris had gone to this defense in previous games. He notably switched to the 1-3-1 in comeback wins over Georgia and Florida. If the team isn’t playing up to the standard, it has seemingly been like an internal switch flipping and changed the game.
Just like the previous two times Paris made the switch, he got the same result. From that point on in the game, South Carolina outscored Arkansas 48-31 to pick up a 14-point win.
RELATED: South Carolina-Arkansas Box Score
The Gamecocks will now advance to the Quarterfinals round of the SEC Tournament where they will face Auburn on Friday.
“We came out flat today. We picked it up in the second half,” Cooper said. “Coming out of the locker room, coach was telling us we’ve got to get stops if we want to win this game. We took that to heart and came out pushing from there.”
More specifically, the defense was able to make some of Arkansas’ better shooters ineffective. While Khalif Battle was an issue, finishing with 20 points, the team’s top scorer, Tramon Mark, couldn’t get anything going.
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Mark played 15 minutes in the second half and didn’t take a single shot. For the game, he only finished with two points on 1-of-4 shooting.
“The main goal, this is going to sound elementary, we were really trying to stay between him and the basket. Sometimes that means there’s a tasty morsel, I call it, to our guys. You want to reach for that thing, you think you’re going to steal it. You have to lay off that thing, be focused on staying in front of him,” Paris said.
“If you’re focused on staying in front of him, he’s an aggressive guy, some of the shots he’s going to take are difficult. He’s such a good player, he can make hard shots and he does make hard shots. The percentages are in your favor…I think we did a good job of being really solid defensively with him. And we showed some help when we could to try to get him slowed down. We tried really hard. We tried really, really hard.”
