VCU's new-look defense is a compromise with their old defense
Ryan Odom has been possessed by the spirit of Mike Rhoades, or alternately, 2016 Will Wade
PROGRAMMING NOTE: This was supposed to come out on Wednesday but Thanksgiving week got hectic. Here it is today instead. Sorry!
I went to Richmond a couple weeks back to run a marathon. It went pretty well, all things considered. I PR’d by 11 minutes and got to enjoy what they call America’s Friendliest Marathon. Based on the four I’ve run I’d have to agree though St. Jude comes quite close. However! We are not here to discuss marathons, as much as I might force a running blog upon you. We are here to discuss what I did that night.
I went to a VCU game, which was fun. They defeated Loyola (MD) by a lot of points in a game I would not describe as high in excitement but featured an impressive fan experience nonetheless. Beating a bad Quadrant 4 team by 26 is, in a vacuum, a non-event. But I was struck by three things while attending the Siegel Center that I have yet to cease thinking about:
VCU’s band is insanely good and puts every SEC band to shame.
VCU’s offense is taking way more threes than I remember, but considering they’re coached by Ryan Odom, this is not such an odd thing to see.
VCU’s defense does not look like it’s coached by Ryan Odom at all and instead reminds me of Mike Rhoades.
The last of these three is what’s continued to stick. VCU just wrapped a preseason tournament in which they went 1-2, which wasn’t ideal, but adjusted for opponent strength, they’ve held six of seven opponents below 0.95 PPP, per Torvik. This makes them a top-10 defense in America with all preseason priors removed and a top-30 team overall. I feel that this is a giant deal because if I know Ryan Odom for much of anything, it hasn’t been defense, particularly not so at Utah State.
The more I’ve looked at it the more surprised I’ve gotten. This is a fairly standard start to a possession for Odom’s first team at VCU last year, which comes after a made basket with 12 minutes to go in the first half against the #107 team in KenPom:
This is a fairly standard start to a possession for Odom’s team at VCU this year, which comes after a made basket with 9 minutes to go in the first half against the #107 team in KenPom:
Last year, VCU barely pressed at all, instead choosing to stay back in a half-court man-to-man defense for pretty much the entirety of the year. They were neither terribly aggressive nor conservative in pick-and-roll defense, ranking a little more conservative than the national average in the Aggression Index. They gave up a sizable amount of threes, forced a national average number of turnovers, and generally forced tough-but-not-impossible shots.
This resulted in the 40th-best defense in basketball, which is both objectively good and also one of the three worst defenses VCU has put together from 2012 to present. The standards here are extremely high, more so than any other mid-major outside of perhaps San Diego State.
VCU’s big fix this year is some mix of these three things: a press defense that Odom has pulled out for the first time in years, a continuation of his trend of running shooters off the line at Utah State, and a choice to marry an increased aggression on the rest of the court with a heavy lean towards drop coverage in pick-and-roll. In some ways this is a reasonable accumulation of all that Odom has tried and/or learned in his career; in another, I think he may have been inhabited by the spirit of Mike Rhoades. Let’s investigate.
BEHIND THE WALL ($): Rodney Ram refuses to give up an open three