


Everyone has seen it a team is behind by a ton of points switches to an aggressive zone and the team ahead looks like they forgot to play basketball for a while.Īnother reason teams may use a zone is to hide a player who is either not great on defense or is in severe foul trouble and the coach wants to extend them in the game. Most college players do not have the passing skill needed to accomplish this over the duration of a game.Ī zone defense is always going to run successfully when it leads to numerous turnovers and bad shots that are usually rushed. The best way to break a zone is by using crisp deliberate passes into the holes in a zone. They can be run a variety of ways most of the good ones are an aggressive style that will actively pressure the ball handler utilizing traps and denying every pass. Zone defenses can be utilized by all types of teams ones who are less athletic and those that are extremely athletic. Aside from a change of pace defense, there are other reasons a zone can be beneficial for teams. The rest of the teams will just run the zone as a change of pace defense to give the other opponent something new to look at. The zone created one of the program’s biggest wins of the last three years, and the relative ingenuity the coaching staff indicated in crafting it indicated that even if this team continues to lose more than they win, they are not a lost cause.As per Three Man Weave and their deep dive into the zone defense and the numbers behind it in the recently published Zonal Shift article, the numbers say that seven teams, with Syracuse included, played a zone as their primary defense more than 75% of the time. It worked against Providence, though, and that’s all that mattered on that night. Most high-major offenses likely figure this out after being initially confused (especially once they have tape on it), so I doubt that the ‘Cats continue to play this same style of zone the rest of the year. Merrimack exposed their man defense, and Northwestern properly responded with a zone that utilized their own length and banked on the fact that a smaller Providence team couldn’t figure it out on time, especially if they happened to be struggling from the outside. That’s not to say the coaches don’t deserve credit for recognizing that they could force a guard-heavy team into bad above-the-break shots by extending the defense, or that the players don’t deserve credit for playing hard all night and forcing those bad shots.īut this defense is not some incredible revelation that could move the ‘Cats up a tier in the Big Ten standings. The Northwestern defense wasn’t bad against Providence, but it might have been a little bit gimmicky.

This sequence was pitiful and downright comical at the same time. Instead, he lines up flat and the offense stagnates.Įven when the Friars properly exposed gaps in the hybrid-zone, they often failed to convert those opportunities in to points, shooting a woeful 30.6% from the field on the game and 22.9% from beyond the arc. That would have allowed his teammate to give him an easy pass, and he suddenly would have a runway to build up speed and attack the defense’s interior. What Providence’s David Duke should have done was step back toward the N logo near mid-court. In the picture below, Turner blocks the direct passing lane, and if a lob pass was for some reason attempted, Kopp would have been ready to pick it off. Instead, you need to back up and create a clear lane. One of the first things you’re taught when attacking zone defenses at any level of basketball is that you can never line up flat, meaning that if your teammate has the ball and there is a defender in between the two of you, you should not be in the same horizontal line. Concernsĭespite all of the great things I saw from the ‘Cats defense against Providence, this performance must be taken with a grain of salt due to how poorly Providence attacked the zone. Even if Beran had made a mistake, it would have been an act of commission rather than omission, which is always preferable on the court. Too often players get stuck in the middle, trying to multi-task on the basketball court, and fail to accomplish anything positive.
#Defense zone basketball full
Give him props for full commitment to attacking the ball with his superior length. Beran came out with visible aggression, almost triple-teaming the Providence guard.
