suggests yes, I'm seeing stronger effort on D and fewer mistakes on post defense, for example.  The team thinks they are defending better.  The UVU game results in terms of number of threes hoisted by UVU suggests they are defending better.

But the numbers don't bear that out (yet), as you say.  I'm looking for reasons why that may be. 

Hypotheses:

• Haws & Seljaas are terrible defenders playing a lot of minutes so that could be hurting us
• No Emery, who some people think is very good defender (I'm meh on that analysis)
• rosey points out that overall in the NCAA more height = better defense, and we play a lot of small ball right now
• Yoeli is being a little less aggressive to stay out of foul trouble
• We are playing at a very different pace, and teams might be getting more offensive rebounds

I suspect some combination of the above is offsetting our expanded defensive intensity and that we will end up pretty close to where we were last year.