HogBallBlog

Pope on how injuries affected the team's scheme: "J Lo is a left handed point guard, so we made a cautious decision last spring when we secured his services, that we were going to change the orientation of everything that we did on the court to serve a left handed point guard. You might say, why does that matter? With a bunch of things. One, it actually suits a right handed big extremely well in a lot of ways. And point guards and bigs work together a lot in a general pick and roll. If you have a point guard that comes off the ball screen to his left, you get to have a big man that's rolling to his right. It's way more effective than what you traditionally have, which is trying to serve a right handed point guard, rolling to his going to his right, and a left handed big trying to roll and finish with his left. So you get straight trying to finish a right handed, yeah, a right handed point guard, and then you have a right handed big trying to finish with his left. You get both guys working their strong hand. Really, really important. And we changed the orientation of everything we did on the offense. We got all the way to the blue, white scrimmage. We lose J Lo, but we said, hey, we're going to keep it this way, because we're going to get them back. And we did get them back. And then it was just this, you know, by the time we got to, you know, through St John's to January, find like, you know, this is going to be really he finally decided to have surgery. "