If Brandon Whitney could have, he would have looked at the camera during the fourth quarter of Montana’s February 7 home game against Southern Utah and winked.
Record scratch. Freeze frame.
I bet you’re wondering how I got here.
“Here” in his case was about three feet off the ground, parallel to the polished wooden floor at Dahlberg Arena and fully stretched out like a running back going for the pylon.
The question of how he got there has a couple different answers. The short version is that, just a couple seconds before, SUU’s John Knight III had picked him clean, plucking Whitney’s crossover and heading off to the races.
Not much stops Knight, the Thunderbirds’ muscle-bound, crimson-haired point guard, even in the clutter and muck of the half-court. With nothing but open air in front of him, it was free money – barbeque chicken, as Shaq would say – until Whitney dove from behind, knocking the ball away and out of bounds.
Poof. Southern Utah’s all-but-guaranteed two points evaporated into nothing. The Thunderbirds didn’t score on the ensuing possession, and Cam Parker followed with a layup for the Griz, pushing the hosts’ lead to nine points with under four minutes to play and all but sewing up a crucial bounceback win for Montana.
“I just put my heart and everything into the game,” Whitney said. “I have the pride to do that. Yeah, I had to get that back.”
That capped a frustrating game for Knight. After dribbling the ball off his foot out of bounds under Whitney’s suffocating pressure in the first half, Knight responded with a hard slash across Whitney’s forearms after a defensive rebound 90 feet away from the basket.
With Knight’s typical bruising head-down drives taken away by Whitney’s quick feet, Southern Utah pivoted into other offensive sets to try to get its star guard going – playing him off the ball, looking for him on post-ups, even running him off screens like Reggie Miller.
None of it worked. In Montana’s 78-67 win, Knight shot 2 of 9 from the field for nine points, and his five assists were canceled out by five turnovers.
That was just one in a reputation-making string of defensive performances by Whitney, who, over the end of January and the beginning of February, grabbed the attention of the Montana media by staking his claim as one of the best perimeter defender in the league.
On January 22, he held Northern Arizona’s sharpshooting Virginia Tech transfer Jalen Cone to 12 points on 3 of 12 shooting. Five days later, Idaho’s Mikey Dixon came to Dahlberg Arena as the leading scorer in the Big Sky and left scoreless. Two days after that, Eastern Washington’s Steele Venters, averaging over 16 points per game, put up five points on 2 for 9 shooting.
“Brandon Whitney is a pretty good basketball player and defense is in your heart,” Montana head coach Travis DeCuire said after Whitney held Venters in check. “When he plays defense like that, our effort is contagious from guys in different areas.
“This is the most advanced defensively I’ve ever been with all sophomores on the floor. Usually, it’s juniors and seniors on the floor…and Whitney’s perimeter defense is a big part of that.”
After losses against Weber State and Idaho State, Whitney then locked up Knight to help the Grizzlies stop their mini-skid.
Tally it all up, and his stops list was four top-10 scorers in the conference, held to a combined 26 points on 7 of 36 shooting, all in the span of two weeks.
Venters and Cone are two of the best 3-point shooters in the conference, with Venters shooting just under 45% from deep and Cone second in the league with 88 3-pointers made. Dixon is an all-around scorer, a north-south slasher and crafty finisher who’s also shooting over 40% from deep. Knight, the chiseled transfer from Jackson, Mississippi, with previous stops at Southwest Mississippi CC and Utah State, is basically an alien, averaging over 14 points per game and shooting over 50% from the field despite having barely the threat of a 3-point shot – he’s made seven all year.
That’s an off-ball shooter, an on-ball shooter, a slasher/finisher and a unicorn – in NBA terms, Klay Thompson, Damian Lillard, Kyrie Irving and Russell Westbrook.
That’s not all because of Whitney, of course. Defense is a team game, Montana’s schemes require all five players, and his teammates help in a million ways – calling out screens, dropping into driving lanes, helping at the rim, switching and switching back. But running that gauntlet points to the longer answer about how Whitney found himself as the perimeter defender with the best reputation and biggest target on his back in the Big Sky Conference.
He’s got all the physical tools – quick feet to stay in front and change direction, long arms that unfurl to bother a drive or get in passing lanes or close out on a shot.
But both Whitney and his head coach would tell you that’s not even half of his success.
Whitney’s assignments start well before tip-off. Before games, he watches clips of his matchup, cut-up reels of every bucket they’ve scored, searching for tendencies – left or right, shooter or slasher, pull-up or spin move.
“You have to know the personnel,” Whitney said. “I scout before, because I know who I’m going to guard that game, and I just see what their tendencies are, what they like to do. Obviously, Venters likes to shoot, so I’m going to take away his space so he can’t shoot, and Knight likes to post you up, so you have to guard that.”
Then there’s his willingness to do it in the first place; defense is hard. Whitney’s already mentioned his heart once. It sounds cliche, definitely, but it takes a lot to chase Venters around screens, or stand tall and take a shoulder to the chest from a driving John Knight. And sometimes, you take the brunt of it, like Whitney did as Daylen Kountz lit up Montana for 29 points in a 75-66 Northern Colorado win last week in Missoula.
That fits right in with the grit-and-grind ethos of the Griz. With three sophomores – Whitney, Josh Bannan and Robby Beasley III – leading the team, the offense can be inconsistent and Montana is prone to long scoreless streaks.
DeCuire, always a defense-first coach, has embraced a philosophy of limiting possessions, forcing the other team to play slowly and keeping scores low. DeCuire’s system wants to take teams out of their early offense and make them run through all their offensive actions before then having to go one-on-one late in the shot clock.
DeCuire has talked about the importance of holding opponents field goal percentage in the 40s, and preferably below. Montana had the best regular-season defense in the conference, allowing 66.7 points per game, which kept the Griz with a top-three scoring margin despite a bottom-half offense.
“It can be definitely exhausting at times,” Bannan said. “Before I came here, I always hated defense, I didn’t play a lot of defense back home in Australia. These last couple of years, defense has become a lot more fun to me. The idea of five guys, you’re just sort of imposing your will on the other team if you don’t let them score. It’s just so frustrating for them, and seeing that frustration, a group of guys coming together and doing that, it’s just super fun.”
So far, Whitney’s been the main source of that frustration. Just ask some of the league’s best offensive guards.
“I know I’m gonna get that assignment before every game,” Whitney said. “So I think about it, I scout the player, and I just have pride in my defense. Like I’ve always said before, if you have the heart to guard, I think you can guard anybody. So that’s what I think, and I come into every game with that mindset.”
Photos by Brooks Nuanez. All Rights Reserved.
