‘We just gotta lock in’: How Washington State’s defense has transformed from porous to staunch

PULLMAN – George Galanopoulos was in Portland when his life veered to the Palouse. It was early last summer, and he had just wrapped up a four-year stint as the head coach of the Texas Legends, the Dallas Mavericks’ G League affiliate, so he was interviewing for a new position – associate head coach of the Rip City Remix, the Portland Trail Blazers’ new G League club.

It wasn’t what he figured his next step would be. Galanopoulos thought he would land a gig coaching behind the bench of an NBA club, or maybe at the front of the bench.

“But what I’ve learned is that this business is so unpredictable,” Galanopoulos said. “You gotta roll with the punches, and you gotta have an open mind and be adaptable, and be open to some of the opportunities out there.”

Which is why, one morning in Portland, Galanopoulos was interested when he got a text about a different kind of opportunity. The message was from a friend connected with David Riley, who had recently accepted Washington State’s head coaching job. Riley, the friend said, would be reaching out to Galanopoulos about an opening on his staff.

Galanopoulos didn’t know much about the situation. He didn’t follow the college game very closely. He knew two things about WSU: It was the college home of Klay Thompson, and it was where Mike Leach once coached. He had never heard of Pullman — much less visited.

But before he knew it, Galanopoulos was on a plane to do just that. He met with Riley, the assistants he had already hired, watched a practice with the players who had transferred to WSU. It “felt right,” Galanopoulos said, meeting everyone associated with the team, feeling like they were ready to win now. It even reminded him of his alma mater, Indiana.

Still, Galanopoulos had one last question for Riley: If all the pieces fell into place, if the Cougars met expectations this season, would they be an NCAA Tournament team?

“Without hesitation,” Galanopoulos said, “he said, absolutely.”

Some six months later, Galanopoulos isn’t just on staff of a WSU team angling toward the dance. He’s played an instrumental role in helping the Cougs get there. He’s been the point man on their defense, which has gone from porous to staunch, a key reason WSU has engineered a sterling 13-3 start to the season, including 3-0 in WCC play.

The Cougars’ defense has not always been good. In their season-opening win over Portland State, they allowed 92 points, which stands as the Vikings’ highest point total against Division I competition this season. A few weeks later, they gave up 81 to Eastern Washington, which has three DI wins. Across the first month of the season, WSU was allowing opponents an effective field goal percentage of 48%, which ranked No. 115 nationally.

Since then, the Cougs rank No. 54 nationally in Bart Torvik’s effective defense rankings, coming in with a mark of 96.7 — second in the WCC in that stretch. Narrow it down even further, since WSU dropped a blowout game to rival Washington on Dec. 18, the Cougars are tops in the conference in several categories: Adjusted defense, effective field goal percentage defense and 3-point defense.

On the surface, it doesn’t make much sense. Since that opening stretch of the season, the Cougs have lost several key cogs. Star wing Cedric Coward is out for the year with a shoulder injury, as is freshman guard Marcus Wilson, and transfer wing Rihards Vavers is likely to miss the rest of the season with broken bones in both hands. Sophomore guard Isaiah Watts has also missed four games in what is expected to be an absence of several weeks with a hand injury.

Besides, Riley admitted, his approach mostly centers around offense. He gives his players lots of freedom to make decisions on offense, and they’ve taken advantage in his free-flowing system, splashing triples and using their size to seal defenders around the rim.

So how does WSU’s defense improve without those guys in the lineup, with a coach who prides himself most on his offense?

“I think the belief, the belief and the understanding of why it’s so important, the why comes from playing more games,” Riley said. “I think the other piece is hard work. We’ve got two really good defensive coaches in George and Jerry (Brown) that have spent so much (time). I mean, I’ve never heard defense been talked about in this amount of detail that these guys go into every single day.”

Perhaps what has unlocked the Cougars’ defense most is their attention to detail on the perimeter. For the season, WSU is allowing opponents to shoot just 29.9% from beyond the arc, No. 48 nationally and second in the conference. Excluding November, that number is just 28.5%, and since that Dec. 18 game in Seattle, the number is just 24.2% — No. 23 nationally, tops in the conference by a healthy margin.

That is no accident. Galanopoulos and WSU’s coaching staff use a closeout system denoted by NBA players with varying abilities from deep: There’s “Curry,” a nod to sharpshooter Steph Curry, which instructs players to deny 3-point attempts, to close out hard as possible. There’s “DeMar,” short for DeMar DeRozan, a capable 3-point shooter but not a particularly skilled one, which dictates players should close out with a hand up.

Then there’s “Soft DeMar,” which indicates a shorter closeout, still with a hand up. The last one is “Ben,” as in Ben Simmons, who has made a career refusal to shoot 3s his hallmark. If an opponent has that designation, the Cougs treat him as a non-threat from the outside.

“It’s not perfect every game,” Galanopoulos said, “but No. 1 is that we need to contest every shot, so we need to at least be there with a hand up, so that they’re not just getting a bare-naked look at the basket. And that has to do with rotations and where we’re supposed to be and knowing where our man is. There’s a lot that goes into that.”

On the defensive end, WSU’s win over San Francisco last weekend might be a microcosm of the season. In the first half, the Cougars allowed Don guard Malik Thomas to score 27 points on 15 shots, including two 3-pointers. Single coverage wasn’t working for WSU, which couldn’t find a way to slow Thomas, especially not with big men playing drop coverage, like in the clip below.

As Ethan Price backs up, trying to cover the roll man, he gives Thomas space to get to his spot and rise up for two.

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In the second half, Thomas managed only seven points, allowing the Cougs to rip off a massive 23-1 run and take control of the game. In the final 20 minutes, Thomas saw lots of double teams, especially off ball screens, on which WSU hedged hard, often with bigs like Dane Erikstrup and Ethan Price.

Getting the ball out of Thomas’ hands worked like a charm, but not just because it forced other USF players to score — but because the Cougars 4-on-3 rotations were crisp, shuffling their feet and knowing where the ball was.

“The emphasis was trying to put two on the ball when he came off ball screens, and then trying to make sure we were rotating the right way,” Riley said. “We just talked about our rotations, and our guys figured that out a little bit better. Tomas (Thrastarson) had some good stands, and multiple other guys — I thought Dane and Ethan did a good job when we were switching, keeping him in front and sending him the right way. So it was a team effort.”

Check out the way WSU switched up its ball screen coverage in the second half. On this possession, Thomas comes off a screen twice, and both times, the Cougs blitz. Thomas is forced to give it up, and the result is a tough rim look for big man Saba Gigiberia, who is averaging less than a point per game.

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Another change that has benefited the Cougs’ defense: Point guard Nate Calmese has stayed engaged on that end of the floor. Early in the season, Riley found himself pushing Calmese not only to stay in front of his man better, but also to stay locked in. He didn’t want Calmese taking plays off, jogging back, getting caught watching the ball.

On the contrary, Riley figured, Calmese has always been one of the team’s best athletes. He’s shown that tons of times on offense, blazing by defenders with his speed and getting to the rim with a tight handle. But the way Riley saw it, if Calmese could leverage that athleticism on defense, he could spearhead WSU’s defense — be “the head of the snake,” in Riley’s words.

Calmese has responded in turn. He has notched at least one steal in eight of his last nine games. In the second half of a Dec. 30 win over LMU, he swiped one, saved the ball from going out of bounds, got it back and found wing LeJuan Watts for an alley-oop, giving the Cougars a double-digit lead for the rest of the game.

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These kinds of plays seem to lend credence to Riley’s thinking: When Calmese is energized on defense, he can be a game-changer, and he has been.

For his part, Calmese says he hears the whispers, knows what kind of defender he’s being made out to be. He wants to play in the NBA, and he knows he won’t get there being a lazy defender, especially not as a smaller guard. He wants to prove to scouts he’s a willing defender.

“That’s the narrative on me right now, that I take plays off on defense and don’t play hard every play,” Calmese said. “So I think for me, to get to where I wanna get to, I gotta play hard every day, every play on defense. And then just for my teammates. I mean, we have four guys out that were probably taking a bigger load on defense than I was, and since they’re out, I gotta step up and do that. I think I’ve answered the bell.”

The Cougars’ defense has also been juiced by their size and length. With Coward and Watts out, Riley has turned to freshman guard Thrastarson, a native of Iceland. Thrastarson is starting to figure things out on offense — he’s scored 17 and 10 points in his last two games — but early in his career, his best asset might be his size.

At 6-foot-6, Thrastarson has the tools to be a staunch defender, and he’s utilizing them in compelling ways. He has four games with multiple blocks, including three against Washington and two on Saturday against San Francisco — the most important coming on a vertical contest that helped the Cougs break off their game-changing run.

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Since Isaiah Watts went down with his injury, Thrastarson replaced him in the starting lineup, averaging nearly 28 minutes per game in the last four games — 28 minutes of bothersome length on the perimeter. The Cougs also start the 6-11 Erikstrup and the 6-10 Price, both of whom find themselves guarding on the outside fairly often, giving opponents long wingspans to shoot over.

All of that size adds up after awhile. It’s certainly having that effect for the Cougs, who are also enjoying valuable rim protection from transfer forward ND Okafor, with nearly two blocks per game on his ledger. Take it all together and you get a WSU defense that has transformed in a matter of months, making the offensive-minded Riley look like a multidimensional coach — with the players to match.

“Once we started playing games and kinda seeing that man, if we just play our game offensively, we’re gonna score. We’re gonna get whatever we want,” Riley said. “We just gotta lock in on defense, because that’s gonna kinda define our season. We’ve been preaching that. The guys knew it, but they didn’t really fully understand that until we started playing these games and seeing how good we could be.”