By DAVID FRIEDMAN
ProBasketballNews.com
Cleveland Cavaliers assistant coach Hank Egan has four decades of basketball coaching experience, including 23 years as a Division I head coach at the Air Force Academy and the University of San Diego, where he won West Coast Conference Coach of the Year honors in 1986 and 1987.
Current San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich served as Egan's assistant coach at Air Force and current Cleveland Cavaliers coach Mike Brown played for Egan at San Diego. Popovich added Egan to his staff in San Antonio; the Spurs made the playoffs seven times and won the 1999 NBA championship during Egan's eight years with the team. Egan is a 1960 graduate of the Naval Academy, where he played for legendary coach Ben Carnevale.
Friedman: "Based on your experience coaching in college as well as in the pros, when you come to a new team where do you start in terms of implementing your defensive principles? Where do you start as a base for getting the team to play the kind of defense that you want it to play?"
Egan: "You always start at the basket and work out. How you play post-up players dictates how you play the rest of the game. We're a team that fronts, so therefore we need a lot of backside help. We try to keep the ball out of the middle because our bigs can't help there because they are on the frontside. We try to force the ball to the outside and get a lot of backside help, but it starts because we want to front the post."
Friedman: "What defensive principles are different in college versus the pros? For instance, usually in high school and the levels of the game below the NBA, players are told to not give up the baseline defensively -- the defender should put his (outside) foot on the baseline and make the offensive player come to the middle. Yet, in the NBA to some degree the defenses try to force the great players away from the middle of the court."
Egan: "Yeah, I think that it used to be (taught to) not give up the baseline and that is still said sometimes, but (now) it's (taught) more that if you give up the baseline we can come and help you without giving up rebounding (position). If you allow a player to go to the middle and we help, it's going to be away from the basket. So then we are turning them loose on the boards. But I don't think that is just changing now in the pros. That is an evolution that has been going on for a while even at the college level."
Friedman: "Why do you think that idea has changed?"
Egan: "Because if (offensive) players get to the middle of the floor they can find all different kinds of things (to break down the defense). People do a lot more rotating now (on defense). Before you couldn't give up the baseline because there was no help. Now when an offensive player goes on the baseline defenders rotate and help one another. That helping principle has expanded how you play good defense."
Friedman: "So it used to be that if you gave up the baseline, then the guy just drove in and scored a layup while the other defenders were watching their men without any awareness of what was happening."
Egan: "Right. Exactly. But now guys are rotating across and rotating back."
Friedman: "That brings me right to my next question. Describe the impact of scouting, particularly the ability to use DVD or video footage that players can digest very quickly. How much has that changed defense over the years and the way that it is taught and the way that it is played?"
Egan: "I think that it has changed defense at every level, but you add another element when you get to this (NBA) level, and that is that the players have corporate knowledge. It's not just four years and you graduate, when it was a part-time thing for them. This is their livelihood. You've got some guys who are in their 12th or 13th year in the league. You can feed them an awful lot of information about the other team and they can absorb it and use it. It is much more detailed at this level."
Friedman: "Would you say that defense is more sophisticated in the way it is played now than the way it was played 10, 15, 20 years ago?"
Egan: "Absolutely -- and technology has had a lot to do with it. It really has."
Friedman: "Talk about Larry Hughes' impact on the team and how it helps LeBron James to play alongside an extraordinary perimeter defender who can guard multiple positions."
Egan: "Larry Hughes is a multidimensional player. He is a good scorer who can shoot the ball with range. He can get in the middle of the defense. He is very good at breaking down the defense, getting inside and creating shots for himself or giving it up. He is also a very calming influence, a very 'Steady Eddie' kind of guy. We can play him on (point guard through small forward). That means that if LeBron is in foul trouble we can flip-flop them (defensively) if we need to keep LeBron in the game. We can do things like that because Larry can play those positions. Just the fact that he is a quality player makes it hard for teams to just tee off on LeBron because we have another guy who can hurt you too."
Friedman: "As a defensive coach, are there one or two numbers in the box score that if you glance at you will know you played the way you wanted to defensively without even watching the game?"
Egan: "The key statistic to me is always field-goal percentage defense. That's the one because it means you've made it hard for (the opponent) to score. Points don't mean anything -- we like to fast break, so we're going to give up more (shot) opportunities. So it doesn't mean as much."
Friedman: "What about point differential? Is that something you look at?"
Egan: "Not so much. Defensive field goal percentage is the (main) one. The other ones (statistics) are key factors, like turnovers. The Spurs are one of the worst teams in creating turnovers, but they are one of the best teams in preventing fast break points because they don't challenge in the backcourt. They get back and set up their defense. They don't try to gamble."
Friedman: "So it's like what you were talking about before in terms of defense starting in the paint -- the Spurs are entrenched at the basket and giving up nothing at the basket. They are not forcing a lot of turnovers because of that."
Egan: "Absolutely. That's the tradeoff they make. That's why the other statistics can be misleading. Good field goal percentage defense means you are contesting shots and making it hard for them to score."
Friedman: "When you coached at Air Force your teams regularly ranked at or near the top of the nation in field-goal percentage defense. Were you employing a similar philosophy to the one that the Spurs are using?"
Egan: "Yeah. We played what they called sideline defense. I learned that from my college coach way back in the 1950s (at the U.S. Naval Academy). It has become somewhat more sophisticated now."
Friedman: "Who was your college coach?"
Egan: "Ben Carnevale. Then I worked for Bob Spear at the Air Force Academy and he was a sideline defense guy. Popovich played there (Air Force) and then he was on my staff there, so that's why the Spurs use it.Mike Brown brings a different element. He's been with Bernie Bickerstaff and George Karl and Bob Kloppenburg, who's kind of an old defensive guru. So Mike has added a lot of different things and new elements to it and it's his defense that we are using now."
Friedman: "George Karl played for Dean Smith at North Carolina, who used the jump-switch and the sideline traps. That element does not seem to be used here (in Mike Brown's defensive plan in Cleveland)."
Egan: "No, not anymore. People have kind of moved beyond that. But to show you the lineage, Dean Smith's first coaching job was as Bob Spear's assistant at the Air Force Academy. So that sideline concept went from Air Force to North Carolina. Larry Brown has the same thing."
Friedman: "He used it in the ABA with the Carolina Cougars when he had Billy Cunningham, Mack Calvin and Joe Caldwell."
Egan: "Right. But they extended it full court. The same principles (are used) now, but guys are so quick and can handle that pressure, so we've taken the same principles and applied them here (in the half court set). It's not run and jump to trap the ball (in the backcourt) but it's run and jump to help one another. A lot of the rotating and stuff like that that North Carolina used to do full court is now done here in the half court."
Friedman: "Also, you can use the shot clock against the other team, right? With a 24 second shot clock, if you run and jump and disrupt the team for just a few seconds, it makes a big difference."
Egan: "Absolutely. See, the clock is the monster. You have a 35-second clock in college, so if you take off the first eight seconds (with full-court pressure) when the offense is getting started and the last eight seconds (with pressure in the half court), you still have almost 20 seconds left. In the NBA you have a 24-second shot clock, so if you take off the first eight seconds and the last eight seconds, you have the offense scrambling with only eight seconds left. So it's a big time difference there. So some of the things that you do in the pros are, exactly as you said, trying to force the offense to burn time and get them in the late stages of the shot clock."
Friedman: "Isn't the difference between the elite championship level teams and teams that aren't at that level the ability to respond when that kind of defensive pressure is put on them, and still get a good shot -- and conversely, to put that kind of pressure on teams to get them in a scramble mode on offense?"
Egan: "Absolutely on the money. Exactly right."
Friedman: "Isn't that what is happening to Cleveland when the Cavs play on the road or when they play against the Spurs and Pacers? The Cavs seem unable right now to respond to that (level of defensive pressure), or to put that kind of pressure on other teams."
Egan: "We began 3-2 on the road and we have lost badly to two teams that are very good. I think that you're right. While our guys are thinking, they're reacting because they have been in a system for a while. Our guys have got the concepts but you have to anticipate a lot of things that happen. We're a little bit behind. We have to improve our ability to react quicker with our defense and to sustain the effort. Then we have to be able to execute better offensively and sustain the effort."
Friedman: "It seemed to me that one of the things that happened against the Pacers (in a 98-76 loss at Indiana on Nov. 24) was some over-penetration by the Cavaliers that led to some offensive fouls. It seemed that some of the dribblers could have stopped one step sooner than they did and passed to an open man."
Egan: "That may have had something to do with it. We could feel the pressure of the moment, whereas they were together and reacting to the pressure as a team. We had guys going a little too fast trying to make things happen because they haven't learned completely to do things together as a team. That just takes time."
Part II: Coming next week
David Friedman's work has appeared in Hoop, Basketball Digest, Sports Collectors Digest, HoopsHype.com and Tar Heel Monthly. He wrote the chapter on the NBA in the 1970s for the anthology Basketball in America: From the Playgrounds to Jordan's Game and Beyond (Haworth Press, 2005). Check out his basketball blog: http://20secondtimeout.blogspot.com.
