What makes the UNM Lobos' defense so effective? Think about it

The story of the first two games of the Eric Olen coaching era hasn’t been about 3-point shooting.

The talk has instead been around a couple of borderline elite defensive performances, leading to a 2-0 record heading into Tuesday night’s game against UC Riverside in the Pit.

The Lobos’ stifling zone defense has forced teams into more than 20 turnovers and less than 36% shooting in each of its first two games — the first time in at least the Mountain West era (1999-2000 season) that a UNM defense has done that in back-to-back games and only the second time it’s happened twice in an entire season.

“That’s what all the coaches stress, especially Coach Olen,” UNM Lobo guard Chris Howell, who played for Olen’s UC San Diego team that won the Big West and played in the NCAA Tournament said.

“... That’s where we turn our defense into offense. And in the handful of runs (in Saturday’s game), you can see that. The defense, that’s what we do. That’s New Mexico basketball.”

Howell said the Lobos’ defense employs a basic concept: Make the other team have to think.

“That’s what Coach Olen loves to do. He loves to mess with the other team’s mind,” Howell said. “So yeah, we love to confuse the (opposing) offense. We love to throw different things — we love the ball pressure. Get into guys. Coach Olen’s biggest kind of defensive quote is, ‘Make the offense do a second thing.’ If you get them out of control going downhill, they get an easy pass out. Okay, now we’re making the next guy do a second thing instead of just catching and shooting. We want him to put the ball on the floor, make him now do what the first guy did, and it just speeds the offense up. And that’s what we love to do.”

Olen likes to think of it an ability to make opposing teams break from their comfort zone.

“I don’t think it’s about confusing opponents. I think it’s about being connected, being versatile and making it difficult in certain areas of the floor,” Olen added. “I think there’s a lot of different ways to do it defensively. ... We want to make things difficult. We want to get people out of the comfortable places that they’re in.”

Future coaches?

Luke Haupt’s father is one of the winningest active high school coaches in California.

Chris Howell’s older brother, Mikey Howell, is an assistant on Olen’s staff who used to play for him at UC San Diego.

It’s little surprise both seem to be extensions of the coaching staff when on the floor.

“Those two guys, we kind of think of them as connectors,” Olen said. “Maybe they’re not going to be high volume on offense, but what they do on both sides of the ball to help your team win is pretty critical. If you’re really paying attention to rotations, you won’t see very many where we have both of those guys off the floor at once because we do think that those two guys specifically, but that type of player in general, is really important to have it having a good basketball team.”

Familiarity?

Olen, the former UC San Diego coach, went up against UC Riverside plenty in the Big West. But that doesn’t mean he’s very familiar with this UC Riverside team.

“I’m familiar with the university, but they have a new coach, they have a lot of new players,” Olen said, adding he planned to dig more into the film later on Monday afternoon and evening.

November basketball primarily tends to be about preparing your team for the routine of the season.

“The thing about early in the nonconference is the preparation and kind of the differences in the cadence,” Olen said. “This was a Wednesday, Saturday with an afternoon tip (last week’s games). That’s a possible cadence that we could have in conference play. So these are important experiences in terms of preparation. This one, we had a day off (Sunday), and then one day prep (Monday). In a couple weeks (in Kansas City, Missouri), we’re gonna have to play back to back. So our ability to kind of retain the information and apply it on short turnarounds is really important.”

Meanwhile, Olen-coached teams have a 15-game winning streak vs. Big West opponents dating back to Jan. 16 — a 66-63 road loss for his UC San Diego Tritons to ... UC Riverside.

Series

This is just the second meeting of the two teams, the first coming in the Pit on Nov. 14, 2009.

In that game, a 67-51 win to open a 30-win season for the Lobos, eventual Mountain West Player of the Year Darington Hobson had 16 points, seven rebounds, six assists, one turnover, one block and a steal in his first Division I game. A.J. Hardeman added 14 points, six rebounds and three blocks and Roman Martinez had a game-high 18 points to go along with four steals.

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