How can I force my opponent to take tougher shots in basketball?

While basketball is a typically high-scoring sport full of action, defending plays a significant role in the game. Even today, players such as Marcus Smart thrive in the NBA thanks to not their scoring but their defensive zeal. Therefore, if you happen to be working on your defensive game, you need to focus as heavily as you can on making an opponent to take a tougher shot than they might already be capable of taking.

That is very important because the sooner you can focus on making your opponent take a poor shot the sooner you can improve to become a better player overall. We recommend that you spend as much time as you can getting used to forcing opponents to take contested, low-opportunity shots. When undergoing UAE basketball coaching, your coaches should want to really focus on making your defending more locked-in.

Remember that in basketball, your job as a defender isn’t to stop every shot – it’s to make the shot as hard as possible to score!

Sometimes, someone will just make the shot regardless of how hard you work. You might hear commentators say ‘great defence, better offence’ – and this is true. You could have your main opponent drop 30 points in a game and still come away knowing you played great defence. Why? Because they might have a low shooting efficiency for the night; on another night, they might have gotten 50 points without your dogged defending.

By the same token, though, your opponent might only hit 15 points but you could have a poor defensive night. Why? Because they got 15 points from 6 or 7 shots. High-scoring does not equal bad defending: it equals, for the most part, good efficiency in the face of strong defending.

How do I make shots harder when defending?

The best ways to make shooting harder for your opponent is to ‘get in their grill’. The best way to force an opponent to shoot badly is to get your body in close without fouling. Then, you need to get your arms up in the air, taking a small step back to break contact as they release the ball. This avoids you from creating contact and fouling, and ensuring you are more likely to get a block on the shot.

For the most part, though, your job is to get close enough and to be dogged enough that you force them to throw up a potential brick. If they make it, fair enough – as long as you avoid fouling for the most part and you make them have to really work for the shot, you are doing enough.

A coach won’t (justifiably) call you out for an opponent scoring high shots so long as you are forcing them to take tough shots. A coach, though, will call you out if you allow an opponent to get easy shots – even if they miss.

Getting up close and personal without fouling is the key to hard, strong defending: don’t judge defensive quality on whether or not a shot goes in; judge defensive quality on how hard shots are being made for the shooter.