Walling Up On Defense

You hear often times that your are what you emphasize. I think intuitively when we teach good defense to close out hard with high hands to challenge the shot and not foul. When in the lane, we definitely want to go chest-to-chest. I came across these set of notes the other day from Dick Bennett which talks about "Walling Up On Defense". Basically what we already teach our players, but framed in a way in which you can emphasize with your players easily during practices and games, here ya go:

Of all the techniques we teach on defense, "Walling Up" is probably the single best thing we do as a program. It is drilled every day in some shape form or fashion, it is emphasized in every live ball situation, and it's something you hear at least one player or coach from the bench yell when the situation arises in a game.

We believe by Walling Up we save outselves 3 to 5% points of defense and 3 to 5 fouls per games on our players. That keeps our posts out of foul trouble, it helps our rebounding, it keeps our opponents off the free throw line (where we can't defend), and provides a mind set that builds the rest of our defense. Walling Up most often occurs in the paint (lane) when an opponent is trying to score. Statistically speaking even the very best players in the game don't make a very high percentage of contested shots. We Wall Up in the post to force players to score over the top of us rather than around us (You put both hands straight up in the air when you wall up and put your body on the offensive player. You don't even have to jump.) We Wall Up on the perimeter to take away vision of a shot or pass you do not put your body on them in this situation.)

The basic technique is to keep your boyd "straight up" without bringing your hands/arms down. In practice we force players to over exaggerate our angles knowing that in a game situation it's a natural tendency to reach a little.

*Teaching Point: The hardest thing to teach is to keep your feet moving and lower body moving to take up opponents space before they have terminated their dribble of pivot.

*The Best Way to teach this technique: Give the ball to an offensive player with his back to the basket on the block on the right side of the rim. Tell the offensive player to take one dribble to the middle of the floor and turn around and shoot a jump shot over the Walled Up Defender. The defender will need to body up to the offensive player and keep both hands up high.

*This technique will win five games a season for you. DS (I don't have any research on this, but I do believe it.) Plus it is fun to teach and emphasize!

Here are a few pictures of NBA players I found that help to illustrate this basic defensive concept around the basket,




Here is a picture of walling up a player a little further away from the basket to prevent an easy pass,


For more info on M2M defensive concepts and guidelines for running the packline defense, check out Dick Bennett's DVD on pressure defense. Coach Bennett is retired formerly of the head coach of Wisconsin and Washington State.