I rewatched the Georgetown/Ohio first round NCAA game last night, and his defense was pretty good, though not perfect. I thought he did very well in several aspects:
He was good in man defense in the post. He didn't let smaller players around him, and he forced bigger players to take contested shots. He's relatively groundbound while he does it, but he's not giving up anything easy, and there was one particular possession where he completely stymied his man on a clear-out where his man made about 4 moves trying to get around him and just got nowhere.
He was good when he got switched onto smaller players on the perimeter. Not perfect, and sometimes they got past him (in which case he didn't recover well) but in general he stayed in front of them and forced them to pass.
He has good defensive court awareness as far as spacing issues go. When he was not directly responsible for the ball, he seemed to be very good at knowing where to drift to deny the cuts that the opponents were trying to set up. He also put effort into closing out on open perimeter shooters. He's too slow to actually do anything but rush the shot, but then again, it's not that often you find a guy coming out from the paint to contest a 3 who actually blocks the shot.
And I think he definitely put the effort out. Where I thought he was at his least effective was on help defense in the paint. He tended to stay home on his man when it was pretty obvious that the ballhandler was going to the hole. There were a few possessions where his man was cutting into the paint behind the ballhandler, kind of leading him to the play, and he still didn't find a way to bother the drive. I don't know if that can be taught, but that was his biggest deficiency in my eyes, in that single game.
And I know this comment isn't really about his offense, but he threw 3-4 phenomenally good, highlight-quality passes in one game.
