MrBojangelz71 wrote:Suggesting that Andrea receives better support on help defense than he provides is somewhat comical to me.
According to your theory then, Andrea relies on help defense a lot less than our wings and power forwards, therefore he is required to provide help more often than he needs it to correct his man defense. So then it would be safe to say he will be more prone to more mistakes with it because our man defense sucks and it exploits our center to correct it.
Allowing your wing or guard to blow by you and then lay blame for the center not rotating quick enough to hide your mistake should fall onto the teams responsibility as much as it seems to fall onto Andrea's responsibility.
That isn't my 'theory' at all. My 'theory' is that nobody in the NBA can stop their man regularly in a one-on-one setting unless their man is horrible defensively (Ben Wallace, etc.). Guys in the NBA are just too good offensively that to be able to stop anybody consistently without handchecking requires a system of teamwork where everybody is doing more than just paying attention to their own man. This means that perimeter players are always on the lookout for angles that might cause bigs trouble and cutting them off before they present themselves, or paying attention to double-team opportunities and reacting quickly on kickouts. It also means bigs need to do more than just defend their man after they've already established post position and received the ball, which is pretty much the only thing Bargnani does even remotely close to well defensively.
Watch some of the best defensive teams out there - the Celtics and Spurs are my favourite examples. All 5 players on the floor for those teams are required to be constantly reacting to how the play unfolds and changing their responsibilities on the floor accordingly. Simple man defense doens't work in the NBA. Even with man defense, you need a contingency plan when a person's man beats him - which happens quite often without handchecking, as already mentioned- and to operate without one is just stupid, because every other team does.
Disagree all you want, but the bottom line is that those perimeter players that get beat don't get beat or blown-by nearly so regularly when Bargnani is on the bench. Why? Because they've suddenly got more space in the paint to operate when Bargnani is on the floor because he isn't paying attention to the paint as much NBA bigs are required to.
My point also wasn't that Andrea relies on help defense less than his teammates. The point is that Andrea is allowed to succeed because his teammates play better help defense behind/around him than he plays behind/around them. His man is much more limited in how he can attack the basket because the other players are all positioned properly and preventing certain ways Bargnani can be attacked offensively. Bargnani doesn't provide that same level of support he receives, which is sade for two reasons, first because bigs are generally supposed to provide more help, not less, that's the biggest advantage of being big in basketball, and secondly because the Raptors aren't exactly a great team when it comes to help defense, so being massively worse than what is generally a sub-par team at help defense is downright embarassing.
Edited to add:
If Bargnani wasn't actually worse than the rest of the team defensively and the wings were a bigger problem than he was (not at all the case) there is no way Triano would have started subbing him out of the game for defensive purposes down the stretch last season. Triano held out as long as he could, but in the end even he, the man who started giving Bargnani loads of minutes no matter how inconsistent his play, decided it was much better to essentially burn two timeouts if necessary to get Bargnani out of the game and then back into the game to avoid having him on the floor on crucial defensive possessions.
