Bobby Portis was awful trying to defend the rim at the start of the season, often looking like a headless chicken on court, not knowing whether he should wall off the driving guard or box out the bigger center crowding him out in the paint.
In college, Portis played the Michael Jordan defensive role of “roamer” (a North Carolina term by Dean Smith for his box-and-one zone defense), which is a player assigned to be the double-teaming blitz player on the playmaker as part of the Arkansas’ own patented “40 Minutes of Hell” full-court press system.
Among the college teams that used this system in the 1980s and 1990s (Georgetown, UNLV, Kentucky, etc.