I'm thinking of taking over a D3 team with the sole intent of making the best "anti-press" team that I could possibly make.

I'm trying to get some ideas on what to do. What kind of O/D should I run? What kinds of players should I recruit? Should I be running slow/fast tempo?

I've heard passing beats a press and was thinking of going with a 3 guard triangle, but wanted some opinions.

my advice is to create the best team possible and then tailor matchups towards your opponents. with my DIII squad - Pacific - i'm likely to play good PER shooters vs a zone and a maybe even a press if i have a speed advantage, but i might play a bigger lineup against m2m.

i tend to never run uptempo against a press (just a personal preference), but i'll run normal if i'm equal/better and slow down if i think my team is slighly inferior or on the road against an equal team.

having a good PG helps. with Mahaffey at PG, i've had much better success than in previous campaigns.

looking at your overall success, i think you'll have no issues creating a quality team to beat the press.

to beat the press, you'll need speed, and since you'll have speed, why not run the press? Add ballhandling and passing and athleticism, with a healthy dose of stamina and I'd say why not run fast break with the press?...some rebounding in the front court along with outrageous athleticism should be effective and at SF, try to find someone who can do everything very well. With this recipe I all but guarantee success...

I think an interesting approach may be to try 3 PGs. The only issue would be that you would miss out on rebounding at the SF position, but every year there is a PG or 2 with decent rebounding skills.

System wise I think offensivley the Triangle would make the most sense as that relies the most on passing, or so they say. Tempo wise you will hear a million different theories, and I am not sure any of them are correct, go with your gut game by game.

I'm play a ton of press teams in d2 currently. I ran motion zone and recruited heavy passers in all positions, especially bigs. I had limited success. On a lark, I switched to fast break / man. It seemed like fast break limited the trapping opportunities and easy buckets press thrives on. The man defense upped my rebounding vs these faster more athletic squads. The fact is most press teams sell out hard for high SPd/ath esp at d3. So their cores are lower. Sell out a bit less on spd ath, limit the easy buckets with fb, pound them on the glass with superior rebounding and good passing is my plan. Still a work in progress but I'm seeing good results so far.