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Another hot topic on the board for sometime. In the first of a two part post I want to look at the Hawks switching man to man defense. I have been recording nearly all of the Hawks games from this season and I have re-watched pieces of the Hawks December trek through the Texas Triangle, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.

I noticed as early as the Hornets game that the Hawks were switching nearly every ball screen no matter what players were involved. This was fairly effective in the second half of that New Orleans game as the switching really kept Chris Paul out of the lane after he had had a huge first half. There are many options for tactics when defending screens. The Hawks are one of the few teams I have seen that switch on every screen. I believe to be able to switch all screens then you have to go back to BK's plan of having 5 guys on the court that are athletic with long arms that can defend. As you can see on many nights when the Hawks have brought a defensive intensity to the game this plan has been able to work. Many times however this has not been the case. In this Texas series we ran up on coaches that were able to manipulate the match ups. The Spurs in particular ended up with ZaZa trying to guard Ginobli on the perimeter simply by setting a high screen.

Over the next few days I am going to watch some other NBA games and I want to see their tactics on ball screens and see the differences.