Part 1: The NBA and HS games intersect on defense
About a decade ago, I spent much of my free time writing about the NBA on my personal Twitter feed. I became enamored with players and teams across the league, finding something interesting to appreciate about just about every team. As my coaching responsibilities grew, I found myself trying to put everything I'd learned from being an analyst into practice, while navigating an entirely new set of challenges at the high school level. Gradually, I drifted away from writing about the league to focus on coaching. I'm still happily immersed in the high school game, but I've missed analyzing what I consider to be an intricate and often misunderstood NBA game.
I took notice when the Indiana Pacers made their run to the 2025 NBA Finals, using full-court defensive pressure and a disruptive style of play. More broadly, it's been fascinating to see tidbits of the high school game trickle into the NBA. Full-court pressure (which we've used after makes and misses for years), end-of-game chaos (a regular part of practically every high school basketball game), offensive rebounding (the subject of Part 2), and zone defense (which we played exclusively last year) are all things high school coaches have long had to consider. Meanwhile, NBA coaches could largely afford to ignore many of those same considerations, given the prevailing style of play and conventional wisdom across the league.
Full-court pressure, and specifically how high defenses are picking up the ball, has been increasing for some time, but this pressure isn't always about forcing turnovers. Teams can use it to speed opponents up and create mistakes, or slow them down by making them work to advance the ball. As Jordan Goodwin noted last season, the latter can be just as valuable, leaving opponents with less time to create a quality shot against a set defense (essentially the opposite of what I discussed in my recent post about the Memphis Grizzlies' emphasis on attacking early in the shot clock).
Of course, pressure comes with costs, including fatigue and the physical demands of sustaining it over a long season. There are also the traditional X's and O's tradeoffs coaches have had to consider, like pressuring the ball at the risk of exposing the defense behind it, although these tradeoffs may be more nuanced than we think. With more controlled, slow-you-down approaches to pressing, some teams can find ways to disrupt offenses without leaving themselves nearly as vulnerable behind the ball.
And even with all the skill and talent in the NBA, a little well-placed pressure can still create problems. Take this play, for example, where Josh Okogie picks up Ty Jerome full court after a missed shot. Jerome is a talented scorer who nobody has been able to stop from getting buckets early this season, but Okogie forces him to his weaker hand and toward the sideline, ultimately drawing an eight-second violation.
Picking up a few easy turnovers along the way is certainly a bonus, and Indiana got its share during the 2025 playoff run. According to my analysis of play-by-play data, nearly 15% of the turnovers forced by the Pacers came within the first four seconds of an opponent's possession. But even without a turnover, forcing opponents to catch the ball closer to their own baseline, often without momentum and facing away from the frontcourt, makes them spend valuable time and energy advancing the ball. By the time they initiate their offense, they're left with fewer seconds on the shot clock and an organized half-court defense to attack. That's a pretty good outcome for a defense that hasn't had to take too many risks, and Coach Mike does a nice job breaking down how it works here.
And if defenses can create these problems during the flow of the game, consider the opportunities when they have time to get organized before the ball is even inbounded. For a brief moment, the dead-ball inbound might be one of the few situations in the NBA where the defense actually has the upper hand. With time to decide where to focus its attention, the defense has five players to cover just four eligible receivers. The inbounder is still an active passer, of course, but in a league filled with extraordinarily talented offensive players, it's a rare opportunity for the defense to dictate the terms of a possession.
Take these few possessions from last week's Suns game against the Warriors, where Phoenix's pressure forced an eight-second violation and created turnovers on two sideline out-of-bounds plays.
Sure, those might just be some first-week growing pains, but in my own study of play-by-play data from the past 10 regular seasons, teams protecting late-game leads turned the ball almost 11% of the time in qualifying situations following an inbound, where the next decisive event was either a turnover or a defensive foul. That's a surprisingly high number given the NBA's spacing, skill, and the knowledge that opponents are trying to foul, especially considering the rate has remained relatively flat over the past decade.
In the two clips below, you can see familiar inbounding set play tendencies from teams at almost every level of basketball: starting close to the ball, moving even closer, rarely reaching full speed, and relying more on screens than cuts or deception to get open. In the first clip, the Cleveland Cavaliers have to use a timeout after struggling to inbound the ball in Monday's game against the Minnesota Timberwolves. They return in a crowded stack formation that requires the officials to briefly intervene before the play, and James Harden makes a toe-tapping catch near the sideline, where two defenders converge before he's fouled.
With the ability to throw the ball into the backcourt in the final two minutes, 94-by-50 feet of space to work with, and some of the most skilled offensive lineups in the world on the floor at the end of games, I'm surprised we don't see more variety in how NBA teams handle these situations, especially given the creativity we see in almost every other aspect of modern NBA offense.
Of course, sticking with conventional approaches may be intentional, and understandably so. Pete Carril's famous advice that you have to be good at the things that happen a lot rings true here, especially with limited practice time. But keeping things simple doesn't necessarily mean sticking with the same traditional solutions, particularly as pressure becomes more common. Having dealt with many of these same challenges at the high school level, I'll share some of the things we've tried and other possibilities worth exploring in future Coaches' Corner posts.