The men’s basketball team has made its mark as a scoring team, but over the past four games the Bombers have changed their focus to the other side of the court.

“We’ve been mixing things up a little bit more,” Head Coach Jim Mullins said. “We’ve kind of geared things toward our opponents. In past years it was always like we’re going to play man-to-man 99 percent of the time. Now we’re looking a little bit more at strengths and weaknesses of the other team and [seeing] what might hurt them.”

On the season, the Bombers are averaging 84.1 points per game, but during their current four-game win streak, the team only surpassed 84 points once. On the opposite side, their opponents have averaged 77.5 points per game, but during its streak the South Hill squad has held teams to an average of 64 points per game.

Mullins said the Bombers still have the same strategy going into games, but they haven’t been shooting the ball as well as they usually do.

“It just seems that we’ve run into difficulty shooting all at the same time,” he said. “It’s not like we’re slowing it down. We’re still looking to push the ball in transition. We are probably defending a little bit better, but I’d say it’s been more matching our defenses to our opponents.”

Junior guard Chris Cruz-Rivas said other teams have countered by adapting to the Bombers’ offensive strategy.

“Teams are starting to slow the ball down against us because they’re trying to prevent us from scoring,” he said. “‘We took that and said, ‘They’re trying to prevent us from scoring — if they’re going to slow the game down, we need to slow the game down for them too.’ We need to get stops on the defensive end to get us going a little bit.”

Junior forward Phil Barera, who leads the team in both rebounds and blocks, said the most important part of making big stops is communication.

“When everyone talks on defense, you have an idea of where your help’s coming from, what your responsibilities are [and] what you need to do,” he said. “It really picks up the intensity on defense.”

With the Bombers ranked last in scoring defense in the Empire 8, Barera said there’s an incentive to come out and play stronger on the defensive side of the ball.

“Teams have called us out on it,” he said. “We don’t want to be the team that’s the lazy team that only cares about scoring. We want to be a team that has pride in our defense.”

Cruz-Rivas said the team has changed its focus in order to separate itself from the bottom of the top-four teams in the conference.

“We knew we could score against anyone,” he said. “Everyone just needs to understand what needs to be done — better late than never. It happened toward the end of the season where it’s the most important. The main thing was just [to] focus throughout practice when the coaches go through our scouting reports and try and dictate what we need to do to prevent other teams’ star players from scoring.”