USC's Triangle-and-2 Almost Beats Memphis

Tim Floyd usually gets a bad rap mainly because of his stint at Chicago in the post-Jordan era that was basically a debacle, not entirely Tim Floyd's fault. Tonight, his USC team faced the number 2 team in the country, Memphis. Floyd went with a triangle-and-2 junk defense to put the clamp down on the high powered "Princeton on Steriods" offense of the Tigers. I came into the game looking to get some clips of the Memphis dribble drive motion, but instead had plenty of triangle-and-2 clips that essentially cramped Memphis' style. While USC lost the game in OT, they held Douglas-Roberts to 10 and Derrick Rose to 9 points, both have combined to average more than 35 a game going in. Watch the video and read my thoughts below,



Triangle and 2:

It's not a complicated set. That's probably why Tim Floyd was able to gameplan 2 hours before tipoff and tell his players they would be playing a triangle-and-2. It works well because it disrupts a perimeter-oriented offense by taking away their 2 best perimeter players. In this way, they allow 1 player to mostly be open on the perimeter while protecting the paint.


The whole key to this defense is the hard denial of the offenses 2 best perimeter players, in this case Chris Douglas-Roberts and Derrick Rose. Memphis ran some screens to get them open to receive the pass but USC played hard M2M once they had the ball in their hands that those 2 struggled all night to gain any kind of rhythm.

For most of the night, there was almost always 1 player open for Memphis. And for the most part they were getting that open person the ball. But with the triangle-and-2, you are basically baiting the other team by saying, "we're leaving that player open because we don't think they are capable of scoring 20 points a game, even if undefended." Now, the triangle does rotate to cover, but if you watch, there is mostly always 1 player open.

Using the triangle-and-2, USC was able to limit Memphis to 37.3 percent, almost 13 percent lower than their near 50 percentage field goal average for the season. The problem for USC was that they themselves only shot 28.8 percent.

I haven't seen any recent videos on the triangle-and-2, but if you are planning on running any kind of zone, Jim Boeheim's DVD on the 2-3 matchup zone is highly recommended. As always, don't forget to check out the the X's and O's of Basketball forum to get all your hoops fill.