The Red Storm had struggled out of the gate last year on the defensive end of the ball, and it’s been a focus of Pitino’s this year to keep it from happening again.
The purpose, for Pitino, in scheduling a team like Towson was to address that very issue.
“We played really great defense, and that’s what we wanted to get out of this game,” Pitino said. “We’ve been working about 75 percent of our practices just with man defense. One of the reasons we [weren’t] ready last year at the beginning of the year is we weren’t very good defensively. We learned a valuable lesson and came away with a valuable defensive performance.”