STILLWATER – When Steve Lutz was hired, he spoke at length about playing unselfish basketball and tough defense. He did the same throughout the summer and into the fall, as well as in Kansas City during Big 12 Media Day, head of the season. Steve Lutz is a defensive coach who loves selfless basketball.

While the Cowboys are 2-0 to start the season, the first thing he talked about in each of his post-game press conferences was how happy he was that the team won, but not happy with the way players played during the started playing selfish basketball as soon as the Cowboys started the season. Pokes took a decent lead, allowing both Green Bay and St. Thomas to get back into the games.

The old saying goes, ‘practice makes perfect’, and while that’s true, one thing that helps differentiate that is watching game film, and lots of it.

Pokes Report publisher Robert Allen asked the trio of players on Tuesday’s availability, Brandon Newman, Robert Jennings II and Connor Dow, about Lutz’s film watching sessions.

“The theme of the last few games has been defense,” Dow said. “We’ll go through it, and he’ll pick everyone apart, he’ll let you know if you did a good job, and he’ll let you know if you did a bad job. But really the film sessions just focused on where we could have communicated better, where we could have rotated better, and guarded the ball here. So there’s been a big emphasis on defense all the way.”

“Following Conner, another thing Coach Lutz emphasized in our video is discipline,” Jennings said. “Like Connor said, there are possessions where we can make six or seven stops in a row and then give up four or five, and it’s just a matter of being disciplined and doing the same thing for 40 minutes. If we could string a 40 minute game together, both defensively and offensively, then we know we’re getting closer to where we need to be. So a lot of emphasis has been placed on discipline.”

Relatively long answers from players, especially about watching movies. But it was exactly how coach Lutz said film sessions have been.

“At least once, probably twice before I review it with the team the next day,” Lutz said of reviewing the game tape. “Our normal pattern is that after the game the staff reviews the film, and when I say you review the film, you go through every possession and say, ‘Arturo made a good defensive play here, he made a bad defensive play here. ‘ .Bryce made a good defensive play here, he didn’t foul out,’ and you just gather information so that at the end of the movie review, each kid has somewhere between probably five and fifty clips. Then they come in and they watch the movie with the offensive and defensive coaches. So now you’ll see yourself on film and you’ll understand, ‘Hey, this is what the coach yelled at me about.’ Hopefully you learn by listening, you learn by seeing, and then you learn by repetition in practice as we try to fix those mistakes.

“The next morning we sit down with the boys and we get lesson clips, we have a good attack, a bad attack, we have a good defense, we have a bad defense. Then I always talk to the team about runs. Points in the game are we might make a great defensive stop, and we get a score on this end and that gives us a 10 (points) lead, but then on the next possession we give up a three here, and then we shoot a bad shot and then we give up a layup, otherwise we make a mistake. Then we hit another bad shot and turn the ball over. Well, that swing there is going to range from probably 11 to 15-16 points. Those fluctuations within a match, if you have too many of those bad ones, you can’t recover.”

The Cowboys were very good in the first two games of the season, forcing 39 turnovers. 23 of those turnovers came from steals. So the defense was good in that area. But on the other hand, the shooting wasn’t the best and discipline was an issue, especially from the first half to the second half.

The Pokes will get a chance to see if there is any improvement between the second game and the third game on Thursday night. We’ll see what Coach Lutz has to say after the game.