Orr Presser----Inside Out Edition

Coach Orr held his weekly presser yesterday, and it was actually pretty interesting. You can go to bgsufalcons.com or youtube and watch it yourself, but here are the high points as I saw them.

The Media seemed to want to talk about Miami's run in the second half that put the game away. Of course, the shame is that without it, the game was very close the rest of the time. Said another way, though, BG never went on a similar run. Anyhow, Coach said it was two things, first that we had too many "empty" possessions and Miami hurt us on the inside of the zone. He said he didn't want to give away our secrets, but there are some situations where our post-player has to guard their player 1-1 while the other four guard the kick out, and in this situation, it apparently didn't work out well.

He noted that Miami was 12-18 from the field in the second half. As I predicted, he was pretty exercised about only getting two offensive rebounds (I looked it up, the next lowest this year was Iowa...with 7!). He also noted that Miami blocked 7 shots in the game (not in that run).

There was a lot of probing about Otis and about the post players. He was very careful to talk about needing players to do their job, which, in the case of post players, is to rebound, defend the rim and score when you get the ball near the basket. He says that we could be doing better, but that covers everyone on the team, too. He also said that our guards are doing all the scoring, so that kind of indicates that is an issue for the big men.

He says that he is an inside-out coach. Our big men are drawing attention, which means that they have to be playmakers by making kick out passes that lead to baskets. When they get the ball in the position to score they need to score or get to the line.

He went to the stat sheet to note that Otis has our highest number of free throws this season. However, based on his formula, (this is me talking now), we did not seem to get what we needed from the big men.

There was an interesting conversation about the concept of inside-out. He noted that there is more to inside-out than just post play, it also includes dribble penetration and offensive rebounding.

He then went on to talk about Scott Thomas, and his development as a player. He says that you cannot be a scorer without getting to the line, and that Scott is learning how to draw fouls and get to the line to compliment his shooting game.

He talked at some length about the importance of getting to the line, which we did not do against Miami. It got me to thinking...here are the stats for free throws attempts for BG going back to the big Dakich years. It is very interesting. In our good seasons, we were shooting lots of free throws, but in our rougher years, the total has been, um, steady.



OK, one last thing. When asked about the playing time of Jordan Crawford, coach said that there are a number of variables. As a freshman, Crawford does struggle, especially sliding his feet on defense. It also is dependent on how Joe and Dee are playing. Finally, you can't really go with 3 guards when you are playing the 2-3 zone, because you need some size on the back line of the zone.

So, those are the high points of the Orr presser. I love it when we can an education from our coaches, and I found this presser to be very enlightening on how we want to play.