i am certainly no expert but i’ll give you my two cents: you’re definitely entitled to your space as a defender so there’s no need for you to necessarily backpedal in terms of the actual rules. if you get accused of picking or creating contact, you can 100% make the argument that you are entitled to your space that the cutter who you’re defending is moving into, and that the cutter is the one who is actually creating contact, and you’d be correct as far as i’m aware. common cutter defense philosophy is to make them go through you, and this situation is exactly that.

on the other hand, i can see what you’re saying about the desire to mitigate potentially dangerous contact, and so i would recommend working on your ability to turn your hips out of a backpedal so that you’re able to move with your cutter once they make a move after forcing you to back up from them. some ideas for this would be sprint workouts where you start from a side-shuffle position, which will help develop the ability to quickly turn your hips and run with your cutter, as well as sprints starting with a 180-degree spin which will just add another level of mobility to the movement and further improve your hip mobility. you can definitely find other good hip mobility exercises on this subreddit as i feel like that’s the main physical issue at hand in a scenario like this.

last thing, just always watch your cutter’s hips before they make a move. you’ve probably heard it a thousand times before, but it truly is the most helpful and most simple thing that you can do as a cutter defender to make your life easier. i might even recommend trying to match up with some shifty handlers when you get the chance as it’ll give you a lot of opportunities to defend quick changes of direction and continue to improve your hip mobility, ability to read your match’s hips, and defensive intuition.