While not relevant, it’s worth noting it’s not Lloyd Pierce’s scheme, it was influenced by the promotion of Jim Boylen to an assistant coach role.

The scheme was developed to help less. Often last year, as soon as a player would get the ball at the top of the key, we would immediately send passive help to the nail to discourage drives to the paint. We would also aggressively show help from the wings on drives and post touches if our defender had a mismatch. This led to a plethora of wide open 3s as our defense was constantly in rotation, and the help didn’t really deter the rim frequency anyway.

Fast forward to this year, the team has playoff goals. The idea is to take something away. The passive help wasn’t deterring drives to the rim anyway, and was leading to a lot of open 3s. So we said, “Ok, the help wasn’t even accomplishing what it was supposed to, so let’s at least take 3s away.” So we aren’t helping as much and trying to guard matchups as straightforward as we can. We still switch a lot, because we have a lot of like-sized dudes AND our guards aren’t good screen navigators, but the idea is to help less. Give up a 2 instead of a 3. That’s great, in theory, but our personnel just isn’t good enough at solo matchups.

For example: Myles has been playing closer to the level in pick-and-roll coverage and is physically forcing his man to set a contact screen on a guard because we’re so terrified of the touch screens putting our defense in rotation. Because of this, we need our other guy to either switch immediately (like-sized pnrs), or fight through the screen. The problem is our guards are so poor at navigating through screens that we end up quasi-switching because the opposing guard flies toward the rim, and because Myles is playing closer to the level to force the contact screen, he’s been late to rotate back and has to chase the ball-handler, which is resulting in many of his fouls.

The doubling is something we’ve been doing later in games as a way to generate more stops. Our system doesn’t want to help unless we have to. That said, Benn should’ve helped immediately when he saw Grant in the post against Tyrese. That’s basketball 101 when you have that much of a mismatch, the dude’s been cooking you all night, and your coach is 10 ft from uou screaming at you to double while you’re in no man’s land ball-watching. And it’s not just Benn who’s been struggling on that end, that’s just the most recent example.

That said, I still understand the point of the system. You want to teach a young, developing team that even with a prolific offense, you still have to play defense to consistently win. The best way to do that is by providing less help and hopefully forcing guys to win their matchups. It also has the benefit (or detriment depending on who you ask), of stopping guys from being able to hide from their mistakes. Mistakes are magnified in this system, which is why Benn and Obi have been getting a lot of focus for how bad they’ve been defensively. The Pacers will have to do one of two things at this point: either change the scheme to provide more help, or the personnel just have to get better at defending individual matchups. I think the team would prefer the latter, but if we want to make the playoffs, it might just have to be the former.