CRAWFORD | Louisville can score with anyone. Can it stop the teams that matter most? | U of L Sports

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — If the Louisville basketball team is going to be a serious player in the postseason, Pat Kelsey knows, the time to demonstrate that is now. That’s why he had them in the top row of the KFC Yum! Center last week.

The cheap seats. The nosebleeds. Where the court looks like a raffle ticket. Where the bounce of the ball is something you have to take on faith, because you can’t always hear it. From up there, the stage is no less big, but it looks small.

Louisville | Kentucky | Indiana | Eric Crawford

Perspective. Kelsey pulled out a favorite book of Rick Pitino’s, “The Precious Present,” and reminded his players that all those basketball opportunities they’ve dreamed of being a part of? They’ve arrived. They are now.

Not necessarily a sleepy Senior Day home game against Georgia Tech, a Quad 4 opponent who had lost eight straight games and won only twice in the league. Louisville won that game 87-70. They were on and off the gas, on both ends.

But this week, Kelsey knows, they can’t get off the gas. At North Carolina on Monday. At Clemson on Saturday.

“It’s the only time I'm going to say something about there being another game besides the one on Monday,” Kelsey said. “But it's a big week for the Cards.”

Kelsey has built an impressive offensive basketball team. He knows that. Even while turning it over at an alarming rate the past five games, Louisville's offense still ranks second nationally in scoring over that span.

The only thing stopping this offense is itself. That's why Kelsey isn't sweating too many offensive details, just working on cleaning stuff up.

His focus is on the other end. Louisville’s defense has been good enough to beat most teams, but not yet good enough to survive the ones it will meet in March.

Kelsey likes to imbed messages in tiny print on the team’s whiteboard every day. Then he’ll pop quiz players individually to text him what that message was.

“Corny stuff coaches do to try to push their buttons,” he classified it.

The message on Saturday was this: “Defense is the key to our destiny.”

Kelsey said it’s this important: He estimates 70 percent of practice time is spent on defense.

All season Louisville has been a team of defensive runs. It may not lock a team down for a whole game, but it has found defense in key segments, or for a half, sometimes longer. Enough to let its offense blow the game open and withstand any run that comes.

“Defense is an attitude, right? It's a mindset,” Kelsey said. “Obviously scheme’s involved, but it's the effort and the tenacity. There's some teams that are built as great defensive teams with unbelievable length and unbelievable rim protection. We have good rim protection. We don't have great rim protection. We don't have any top five defenders in the country, but we’ve got very capable guys that are bought in, that try hard, that that care about scouting report, that are assignment impeccable. But you have to do it all the time. It's one possession at a time.”

I asked Kelsey Saturday how much better he thinks the team’s defense can get, and he asserted that improvement is possible and necessary. He also noted that Louisville’s defensive efficiency ranks 28^th in the country. And that is respectable.

“How much better can it get?” Kelsey returned to the question. “You look at our numbers, like, from a KenPom standpoint, it's pretty good. Now you watch the last eight minutes of the SMU game the other day, it wasn't good enough on the road if you're in a big-time conference game.”

A look inside Louisville’s defensive efficiency shows why there’s still concern. Unlike its offense, which is steady across opponent strength, Louisville’s defensive efficiency has been built largely against the weaker half of its schedule.

Yes, Louisville ranks 28^th overall in defensive efficiency, giving up 98.5 points per 100 possessions. But its points allowed per 40 minutes, 71.8, ranks 112^th nationally.

A look at Louisville’s numbers per NCAA NET quadrant group is below.

Louisville defense chart — Statistics provided by the CBBAnalytics.com website.
Eric Crawford

While Louisville scores in the 80s, at least, on average against all quadrants of opponents, its defensive efficiency drops sharply against Quadrant 1, the toughest games, on defense. Against Quad 1 competition, Louisville's points allowed per 40 minutes tells a different story. It balloons to 81.3, ranked 127th in the country.

And that, in the end, that’s the metric that matters come March, when all of the weak teams are weeded out.

“Our defense is the key to our destiny,” Kelsey said. “And we all know that, and the guys know that too. I thought we were pretty good tonight. We’ve got to continue to get better.”

At this point in the season, nobody cares about how you guard Georgia Tech. They care about how you defend teams that can hurt you back.

Louisville already has the offense of a team that could play beyond the first weekend into meaningful March matchups.

Whether it has the defense of one will be decided this week.