Analyzing West Virginia's Game Winner over Georgetown

What a weekend of college basketball. The number one seeds are set and everyone is starting to get at their brackets, its a great time to be a basketball fan. Like most of you I watched the Big East final yesterday between West Virginia and Georgetown on ESPN. What a great game, and a great finish. I had a chance today to look at that final inbounds play and it was interesting how Georgetown defended it. They made a critical switch which allowed Da’Sean Butler to catch it clean, beat a slower defender and get a decent shot off inside the lane.

Here is a little breakdown of it. First, off, WVU starts off with 3 players around the lane, almost in a FT lineup, with the 4th player at the weak-side corner. That 4th player, comes across the lane along the baseline scraping off of Butler at the bottom of the lane,

To me, what's interesting is how Georgetown's inbounds defender decides to play. He appears to be in a help position without pressuring the inbounds. This proves to be a crucial error in my opinion.

What happens next is Butler comes up to the top of the key getting a half-screen from the top post. Butler's defender tries to go around instead of chasing, and bumps the defender off thus switching Monroe on to Butler,

Again, notice where the inbounds defender is, supposed to be help-side defense I suppose but in my opinion, not really doing anything because he's not denying Butler the ball.

The ball gets inbounded cleanly into Butler, Monroe of Georgetown tries to closeout and Butler takes advantage of the slower defender to get by Monroe and get right into the lane for a little floater which goes in,


For Georgetown, I think what went wrong was the inbounds defender. Had they put the inbounder right up on the sideline, the pass to Butler would've had to been a lob or further away from the basket, allowing Monroe more time to close out. Secondly, I don't think they should've switched in the first place. If the original defender had chased, he would've had enough time to close out and keep Butler in front of him. I know that usually you tell your team to switch at the end of games, but when you know who the other team's go to player is, and you know who you want defending them, then I think you want to be M2M or at least a Box and 1, denying Butler the ball.

Anyways, we can deconstruct a play to death, but overall I though West Virginia did a great job in exploiting what the defense presented and was able to make the shot. If you are a big fan of West Virginia basketball, and Coach Bob Huggins, then take a look at Bob Huggins's DVD on his Cut and Fill Motion Offense.