Film Room: How Auburn "makes everything hard" on defense
Auburn's defense was relentless against a top-10 Purdue offense. Here's a closer look at how the Tigers force opponents to take tough shots.
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(Zach Bland/Auburn Tigers)
BIRMINGHAM — According to Bruce Pearl, the big difference between this season and last season for Auburn basketball is the way its guards are defending.
“It was a bit of a bugaboo for us a year ago,” Pearl said recently. “It was.”
There’s a lot to analyze from Auburn’s historic run through the toughest non-conference schedule the program has ever seen. The Tigers are currently rocking an adjusted offensive efficiency of 120.4 on KenPom, which would be the highest mark any Division I college basketball team has had in nearly 30 years.
But it’s not a total surprise to see a team that ranked No. 13 nationally last season in scoring take it up a notch this season, after returning three of its top four scorers — including an All-American center. Auburn also added one of the ACC’s best scorers and two blue-chip freshmen with immense offensive talent into the mix.
Getting better on defense, though? That was less expected. Right now, Auburn has the nation’s No. 10 defense on KenPom. The Tigers are close to the nation’s-best effective field goal mark it posted last season, sitting at 44.1% compared to 43.7%.
Auburn has jumped nearly 150 spots nationally in both defensive rebounding rate and defensive free throw rate. The Tigers are blocking a higher rate of shots (16.5% from 15.9%) and facing even fewer 3-point attempts (32.5% from 33.4%). And they’ve improved from No. 21 nationally in opposing assist rate (42.7%) to No. 2 (34.8%).
And, of course, all of this statistical improvement has come during a stretch in which Auburn has played a top-10 strength of schedule.
Last season, the Tigers faced just one top-15 KenPom team in non-conference play and lost. They went 3-1 against four teams that were in the top 100, but none were in the top 50.
This season, Auburn has played three top-5 KenPom teams in non-conference play and went 2-1. They went a perfect 4-0 against four teams that were all inside the top 50. Auburn’s non-conference strength of schedule is up 137 spots from last season.
Auburn played six of KenPom’s top 25 offenses in college basketball, including two of the top 10 and four of the top 12. The Tigers went 5-1 in those games, holding three of those opponents to their current season-lows in scoring.
Last season, Auburn led the nation in defensive 2-point field goal percentage and was third in block percentage. The Tigers then brought back their two centers — Johni Broome and Dylan Cardwell — along with athletic power forward Chaney Johnson. With that senior-laden frontcourt, this defense was always built to be strong inside the arc.
The backcourt, though, was a different situation. Denver Jones and Chad Baker-Mazara were back, but the Tigers were adding Miles Kelly, Tahaad Pettiford, Jahki Howard and JP Pegues into a new system. Jones was also playing some point guard, a position he rarely played in his first season on the Plains.
Yet Auburn, remarkably, has been stacking up dominant performances against some elite backcourts. Teams are routinely held below their usual shooting performances, and scoring guards have seen their averages fall after playing the Tigers.
The point guard defense, spearheaded by Jones, has been particularly elite. After Auburn’s comfortable win over Purdue on Saturday, the defense was able to add a shutdown performance against the nation’s top floor general, Braden Smith, to its list of showings against point guards in Quad 1 games:
Houston’s Milos Uzan: 10 points, three turnovers, fouled out
Iowa State’s Tamin Lipsey: 6 points, 3-9 from the field, just two assists
North Carolina’s RJ Davis: 12 points, 5-11 from the field, just one assist
Memphis’ Tyrese Hunter: 11 points, 4-10 from the field, just four 3PA
Duke’s Tyrese Proctor: 12 points, 4-10 from the field, just one assist
Ohio State’s Bruce Thornton: 3 points, 1-8 from the field, just one assist
Purdue’s Braden Smith: 8 points, 3-12 from the field, five turnovers
Combine that type of suffocating perimeter defense with the tried-and-true dominance on the interior, and you’ve got a unit that is a nightmare to face in half-court settings.
“We pride ourselves on our defense,” Broome said. “We make everything hard.”
And those words have never been more true than they were right after Auburn’s victory over Purdue. The Boilermakers have a top-10 offense on KenPom and have finished in the top 12 nationally in five of their last seven seasons.
But they needed an 11-0 run against the Tigers’ reserves at the end of the game just to crack 60 points. One of the nation’s best 3-point offenses had to hit some garbage-time ones in order to finish at 8-23 for the entire game.
“You can control your outcome with how you defend, and I thought we just did a better job of making it difficult for Purdue,” Pearl said. “They're better from 3 than they are from 2. We made them take tough 2s. They made some, but missed enough.”
In this edition of the Film Room, let’s take a look at 10 defensive possessions from Auburn’s win over Purdue to illustrate just how difficult the Tigers can make life for any opposing offense.