Following the regular season, GoldandBlack.com spoke with Purdue assistant coaches Greg Gary and Steve Lutz to review the season on offense and defense, respectively.
Here's what Lutz, in his second season overseeing Purdue's defense, had to say.
More ($): Greg Gary on Purdue's offense
GoldandBlack.com: What was your mission defensively and how did you want to build this team into what it’s been defensively?
Lutz: I don’t know that our mission is any different from one year to the next. Obviously, we’re always going to play man-to-man defense and that’s going to be the staple of our program. I think that this team is obviously built a lot differently than last year’s in that we have guys that can move that are bigger. Obviously as Trevion (Williams) has evolved and continued to get in better shape, that allowed him to somewhat fill a role similar to Matt (Haarms) and when you compare Matt vs. Isaac (Haas), this year’s team and last year’s team, Matt’s got the ability to hedge ball screens and early on especially that was our focus, to be a little more aggressive in our ball-screen defense, not allowing guys to get downhill and attacking the basket nearly as much as last year. Now as the season has gone on we’ve probably downed ball screens and kept them on the side more, which is probably just more a reflection of the best way in our opinion to guard other Big Ten teams. I would say that’s first and foremost. As the year has gone on, obviously we’ve not pressured the ball as far out away from the basket. Again, that’s probably more a reflection of guarding Big Ten teams rather than maybe an overall general theme as to what we’re trying to do."
