![]() There’s Padilla, who has taken personal pride in her ascension from a score-first guard at Penn to a point-of-attack defender at USC. There’s Marshall, who Gottlieb praised as “quarterbacking” USC’s defense from the paint. There’s Watkins, who racks up deflections nearly as frequently as she does points. The metric has spilled outside of practice courts and film rooms, Burns discussing Padilla’s score excitedly with senior McKenzie Forbes in a Galen Center hallway long after practice wrapped up Thursday, the foundation of a program approach that has seen widespread individual defensive improvement. ![]() ![]() “I’ve been doing this chart a long time, buddy, and I don’t know anyone’s done a 0 in 30 minutes,” Burns said, Padilla placing her hand over her heart with a smile. JuJu Watkins’ legend grows with 42-point game as USC women top Colorado 12 against Arizona in which Padilla wasn’t tabbed for any points on Burns’ system. As Burns sat in a baseline seat after Thursday’s practice, she stopped an exiting Kayla Padilla for a moment, gushing in awe over the senior’s game on Feb. The program, Gottlieb said Thursday, has improved in their understanding of defensive coverages, a trend that shows both in simple stats – USC hasn’t surrendered more than 70 points since mid-January – and in Burns’ metrics. Players have become accustomed, Burns said, to coming into film sessions, watching their mistakes, and bickering with her over their scores. “And you do not want to be red,” Burns grinned.Īcross the last three games, half of USC’s roster has been in the green. Individual points, then, are compiled into a simple equation: points divided by minutes played, for a stat Burns calls simply “D%.” Anyone with a score of 29% or lower (which, if prorated to an entire team’s output, would lead to 60 points or less being surrendered), Burns defines as being in the “green” zone. Say a big doesn’t box out and it leads to a 3-pointer – Burns assigns that defender three points. Say a perimeter defender was supposed to force someone baseline, and they went middle for a layup – Burns assigns that defender two points. On plays where an opponent scores, Burns assigns those points to the USC defender or defenders directly responsible under the Trojans’ defensive scheme. It provided the seeds for a defensive metric system that Burns has morphed and developed across the recent years of her coaching career, first bringing it to Louisville, then back to USC. So when San Diego State returned home, Burns called Bennett and asked him about the system on his whiteboard. Defense, she continued, was “more just, your coach saying, ‘You stink.’” From basketball’s beginning of time, she explained with youthful enthusiasm Thursday, it was easy for players to empirically digest offensive performance: shoot 1 for 14, you played bad. And in the locker room, Bennett’s whiteboard caught Burns’ eye: scrawled with figures and words like d efensive percentage.īurns, for long years, had mulled the lack of empirical data available to measure defense. Burns knew longtime Saint Mary’s men’s coach Randy Bennett from his early coaching days at the University of San Diego as such, Bennett offered to let Burns and her staff shower in the men’s locker room before they returned home. Except it’s hardly a secret if you spend a minute with Beth Burns, USC’s defensive guru and Lindsay Gottlieb’s right-hand woman, who has implemented and popularized her own system of subjective defensive analytics – this “goal chart” – that the entire program has bought into.īack during her second stint from 2005-2013 as the head coach of San Diego State, Burns and the Aztecs took a trip up to play Saint Mary’s. “The defensive goal chart,” Marshall said, walking away after Thursday’s practice, flinging morsels of information over her shoulder with a smirk in her voice. LOS ANGELES - Rayah Marshall grinned as if she were the keeper of a kingdom’s tactics, backpedaling quickly away from a question about customs that have buoyed the USC women’s basketball team’s recent defensive surge.
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