First, some required reading: Grant Wahl’s February SI piece on the dribble-drive motion (DDM) offense. Fascinating stuff, both from an X’s and O’s viewpoint and getting a behind-the-scenes look at how basketball coaches share innovations. Apparently, Calipari got the idea for the DDM offense from a juco coach from California named Vance Walberg. The basic mechanics:
And so, using a pepper shaker as the basket, white sugar packets as offensive players and pink Sweet’n Low packets as defenders, Walberg explained his quirky creation, a high-scoring scheme featuring four perimeter players and a host of innovations. Unlike Knight’s classic motion offense (which is based on screens) or Pete Carril’s Princeton-style offense (which is based on cuts), Walberg’s attack was founded on dribble penetration. To Calipari, at least, it embodied two wholly unconventional notions. One, there were no screens, the better to create spacing for drives. Two, the post man ran to the weak side of the lane (instead of the ball side), leaving the ball handler an open driving path to the basket.
You really need to read the whole piece to get all the nuance. One observation: The offense is designed to avoid mid-range jumpers–which jives with kenpom’s work showing that mid-range shots are exactly the shots a good defense wants the other team to take.
Regarding Memphis’ defense:
Although Calipari didn’t adopt Walberg’s scrambling full-court defense (he’s convinced that winning at the highest level requires stopping opponents in the half-court), he did transform his defense in one major way. He says that during his days at UMass, from 1988 to ’96, he wanted his teams to be last in the league in steals. “Why last? Because [gambling for] steals gets you out of position,” he explains. “I wanted to give teams one tough shot, and that’s it. Now we want to be first in steals — in the country. Because the way we play now, if the other team holds the ball, we’re going to be on offense 30 percent of the time and on defense 70 percent. Now who’s going to control the game? But if we’re going after steals, we make them play faster.” At week’s end the Tigers had 8.7 thefts per game.
So we have an offense that will try to isolate their talented guards against our fairly undersized guards to create driving opportunities and a defense that will be trying to force steals against a team who has battled a turnover addiction for two full seasons. No one knows how to take advantage of an opponent’s playing style in tournament play like Izzo, but I do think this particular opponent is going to require an extraordinary effort–both in terms of the game plan and in terms of the players playing 40 minutes of intelligent basketball.
Now to the film room: The X’s and O’s of Basketball has a number of posts on the DDM offense. Below are two Youtube clips from that site.
Jimmy Dykes diagramming the DDM offense:
A highlight reel of Memphis playing the DDM offense:
(Note that driving the elbow of the lane seems to be as important to the offense as driving all the way to the hoop.)
Now before we all start making plans for Sunday afternoon that don’t involve watching MSU play in the regional final, we should keep in mind that the highlight reel doesn’t show Memphis doing two things they have a tendency to do with frequency: missing three-point shots and missing free throws. Izzo’s task is to figure out how to make sure Memphis does more of those things than the things they’re doing in the highlight reel.
That’s the end of the study session. There won’t be a pop quiz on this material–just a major test for the Spartans Friday night.
Calipari’s comments about a fast pace game looks to be good news for us, we seem to handle that better than the slow down D of Iowa and Wisconsin.
The bigs will be the key on defense, especially if Memphis can’t shoot the three. No open passes under the basket or drives off the baseline.
Even if Gray isn’t injured he may not see much PT as I can’t see him keeping position and doing what is needed, unless Izzo just uses him to pound the Memphis bigs into submission with some hard fouls.
Great stuff, kj. The guard’s lack of height weakness may be actually tempered by the Tigers poorer outside shooting. I don’t know if I can handle 40 minutes of concerted driving efforts on Neitzel and Lucas, though. So how does this get solved? The weak-side post defender moves to the ball-side, and the defender on the weak-side wing rotates in on the offensive post player?
An offense based on dribbling. Coach Norman Dale weeps.
[…] I didn’t see it. Anyway, Spartans Weblog has a great breakdown of the DDM offense Memphis runs. Study Session: The Dribble-Drive Motion Offense « Spartans Weblog Go and read the entire article, it is really well done. There’s a youtube clip in the article that […]
What about a box and one on Rose….sure we might give up and bunch of three’s but why not make them shoot…also when they penetrate what about anticipating where they are going and take charges?
Memphis runs it’s offenswe because officials won’t csall them for running 6 steps with the ball…typical skilless but atheletic ghetto hogs…
[…] college basketball trends. Remember that piece he wrote on the Dribble Drive Motion Offense that we all read in March? (Let’s not talk about what happened in the NCAA tournament game that MSU played shortly […]