They get the ball out to the ball handler up the floor and they then push ahead before the defense gets set...

It looks like they had rules against the pressure, and the ball handler knew the rules but for whatever reason you didn't have guys in the right gaps helping relieve pressure, and when they did happen to be in the right spot there were times they weren't aware of their surroundings and made a play out of their comfort zone

Reducing that down to little guards vs little guards kinda disregards the strategy in what's actually going on with the press...1 on 1 they handled the press decent well, but sometimes they were trapped and didn't have relief in the right spot...this led to trying to make a play before the defense got into the trap, but sometimes they were chasing ghosts and wound up throwing it away

Pressing is useful because 90% of your games are played against teams that don't press, so 90% of what you practice for is no press, hard to master something you don't practice for and hard to justify (limited) practice time for things you rarely see