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Andrea Bargnani has his off-season orders.
He’s just not sure exactly how to go about following them.
Jay Triano wants his 7-foot centre to work on his team defence. His man-to-man or on-the-ball defence was actually quite good this year, according to Triano. It’s the team defence, or off-the-ball defence that Bargnani struggles with.
“This year we sent him home telling him to become a better defensive player,” Triano said. “He’s good on the ball. We switched a lot of things late in the year because we thought our bigs could sometimes keep perimeter guys in front of them better than our perimeter guys did ... He doesn’t understand the concept of team defence and getting over on the weak side and helping. That’s the one thing we want him to do. We also want him to become a better rebounder.”
Bargnani has gone home and come back having made an improvement each year, but he’s a little stumped with working on team defence.
“That’s tough because it’s not something you can work on individually,” he said. “I think I can watch video, gain experience. Maybe try to use the national team games, if I’m going to play them to try to learn something. I think that’s the most difficult part to learn because it’s something you can’t work on, like: ‘I’m going to work on this for the next week.’ You can’t because you don’t have the other nine guys.”
