In Reply to: Just in these pick up games you can contrast posted by ej on August 31, 2026 at 09:14:49
Tough to overcome that deficit in lateral movement. On the other hand, I do think there are ways to compensate. A couple of ways, IMO, are to use strength or length. Fortunately for us, each of the guys we're talking about has one or the other.
My take on watching Perry for two years now is that while he's not the quickest guy, he does the best he can with what he has. While I wouldn't qualify him as a good defender, I wouldn't call him a bad defender either. Dent, for example, had loads of quickness but was a horrible defender. He rarely got in a stance, used poor angles, and was easily bumped off his position. Perry actually does many of those things pretty well. So while he isn't going to be earning any defensive awards, I expect the overall backcourt defense to be much improved with both Petty and Stink being significant upgrades.
Kusturica, on the other hand, looks lost at this point, but he's also only 17. He's probably never seen the kind of athleticism he was going up against in those runs for any extended period of time. I think he'll improve, and probably pretty quickly. What he does have going for him is his length. If he can learn to recover quickly, he has the length to still challenge shots even when he's beaten.
The zone has been mentioned, but there are a lot of ways to skin a cat. Personally, I like coaches who play guys to their strengths and funnel the ball. If a guy isn't quick enough to keep someone in front of him going both directions, don't ask him to. Take away one side, shade him toward the other and make him go where you want him to go. It's much easier to keep a guy from going one direction than it is to try to stop him from going in either direction.
That's actually something Matt Painter has done very well at Purdue. His philosophy has often been about keeping the ball out of the middle and forcing the ball toward the sideline/baseline, where the defense can load up and use its size and length. That's the kind of thing I'd like to see here. Instead of asking a guy with questionable lateral quickness to win every one-on-one matchup, put him in a position where his strength or length becomes an advantage.