MELBOURNE (Paulo Kennedy’s View from Downunder) - Everyone likes free-flowing basketball where the offensive stars get to show off their skills … right?

Not Australian national team coach Andrej Lemanis.

"That's certainly a big philosophy of mine, disruption," he said.

"My whole thing is about finding ways - and that's on the coaching staff to be smart enough to find those ways - to disrupt the opposition and how they're comfortable playing."

Lemanis was coach of the all-conquering New Zealand Breakers when they claimed an NBL three-peat from 2011 to 2013, with those final two seasons very much built around disruptive defence.

Yet, while few NBL fans and opponents will quickly forget the menacing sight of Cedric Jackson, Mika Vukona and Dillon Boucher forcing turnovers, Lemanis is adamant his definition of disruptive shouldn't "be confused with crazy, trapping pressure".

"I'm very conscious of not getting disruption confused with pressure because I think those top teams are too good," he said.

"If you just go and double them you end up giving up lay-ups and it's not about that."

When Lemanis took over the reins from Brett Brown last season, he had the unenviable task of rebuilding a halfcourt defence that for the most part was the Boomers' most effective tool.

The reason it needed an overhaul was the packed-in nature of Brown's schemes meant the Boomers rarely generated offence from their defence, meaning they had to beat the best international teams in halfcourt battles.

"We certainly don't want to become a team that walks it up, for Australia pace is something we're good at," Lemanis said.

Given the Boomers have the worst record of the world's top 10 teams in games they score fewer than 70, he is right on the money.

Last Aussie winter, Lemanis had 14 games in charge of various national team incarnations, and he has made progress keeping that solid halfcourt base while being more disruptive.

Impressively, he also guided an inexperienced Emerging Boomers side to win after win in low-scoring games at the Stankovic Cup and World University Games, and he did it by finding schemes to slow opponents down more than speed them up, as conventional wisdom might suggest.

Given how top teams like Argentina, Serbia, Slovenia and Spain had unravelled the Boomers defence under Brown's watch by subtle movement followed by well executed pick-and-rolls, Lemanis sees stripping quality opposition of time as an absolute must.

"They get into offence with 10 or 12 seconds on the shot clock," he said.

"They don't have the time to move you around and they get stuck in a high on-ball screen while you've still got defence set and a better opportunity to actually defend it … It's about finding ways of getting them out of their rhythm and still make them take contested jumpers."

Yet while this may make it seem like the traditional Australian press and ball pressure has no place in the current-day Boomers, for Lemanis it is the crucial first step to eat up the clock.

"I think our mentality from an Australian point of view is we do like to get up-and-in and that's something we're known for, we can use that to disrupt teams over the course of the game," he said.

"It's a pain in the arse over 40 minutes, the point guard from the other team thinks, 'Bloody hell, do I have to work hard just to get a catch every time?'

"And after a while, it becomes easier not to go get it. Then the four-man is bringing it up and someone else is trying to start their offence."

And that takes away flow and it takes away time.

Then other disruptive factors can come in - schemes that can be picked apart over a 20-second offence but which rotation can cover for 10-12 seconds.

"That's definitely what I'm about," Lemanis said.

"It's being up the floor, finding different ways to defend on-ball screens, giving different looks with your defence, just trying to make sure your opposition never gets into a rhythm."

The FIBA Basketball World Cup is just three months away and the first test of this defensive style for 2014 came on Thursday in the Boomers' thrilling overtime clash with China in Game 1 of the annual Sino-Australia Challenge in Perth.

While this is a squad of players very much on the Spain 2014 fringe, Lemanis makes no secret every game will be used to assess what is and isn't working and then fine tune where needed.

From the outside things appeared to go swimmingly on that front on Thursday.

The Aussies forced the visitors into 20 turnovers, won the points-off-turnovers count 23-8 and fought their way back from a 15-point deficit thanks to the way their pressure threw the Chinese out of sync.

But have no doubt - Lemanis will have clip after clip where his chargers mistook disruption for aggression.

Particularly early, they repeatedly were too up-and-in and committed cheap fouls. Or they were too greedy going for a steal and left the backdoor open for easy Chinese baskets rather than being content to contain having already taken valuable seconds off the shot clock.

There was improvement as the game went on - Mark Worthington and Rhys Martin leading the charge - but expect a more 'high IQ approach' from the Boomers as the four-game series wears on.

The same goes for Lemanis' Triple P offensive philosophy, which was nowhere to be seen early in Game 1, but gradually crept into the Boomers game and delivered repeatedly when they got it right.

What's the Triple P philosophy? It's Pace, Poise and Penetration, but more about that next week.

*Game 2 of the Sino-Australian Challenge is tomorrow (Saturday 31 May) at 6.30pm, Western Australian time, with games three and four next week in China.

Coverage is on ABC2. For more details go to www.basketball.net.au.

Paulo Kennedy

FIBA

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