The Anatomy of the Hoosiers 2-3 Zone Defense
by JustAJ on Feb 13, 2012 9:18 AM EST
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PrintFirst of all, I disapprove of zone defense. Do I get it? Yeah, but I’m still not a fan. I coached a 7th grade basketball team this winter and it took me nearly half the season to reluctantly switch from a man to a zone, even though it was obvious we were physically outmatched from day 1. But, that anecdote right there explains the greatest value in a zone defense and specifically a 2-3 zone defense.
A 2-3 zone is mostly used by a team that is physically outmatched defensively and needs some way to try and stem the tide of perimeter slashers. A 2-3 zone is designed to protect the lane at all costs and force a team to shoot over the top of your perimeter guards to score. As of recently that has worked out very well for the Hoosiers as their most recent competition has not been notoriously good shooting teams. We see this in not only low shooting percentages from the opposing teams, but also a large foul differential when the game is over.
What you will see when you pay attention to
In a 2-3 you have two players at the elbows and three players down low in the post. The big man sets up in the lane and uses his wingspan to guard a large area, while your larger forwards are in charge of taking care of everything outside the lane and below the free throw line. This is where the 2-3 is at its weakest. That is a large area to guard for one man on each side of the court. The chinks in the armor of a 2-3 are on the wings extending from the free throw line, the high post and the "Verdell Spots" (pretend there is a 15ft arc around the court at the free throw line. Verdell spots are those 15 foot pull up jumpers just a few feet to the left and right of the actual free throw line.)
Good passing and patient offenses can exploit these points with good ball movement, as the defense must constantly rotate to cover everyone. Thus leaving them vulnerable to the weak side (side of the court the ball isn’t on) skip pass. Any patient offense knows to rotate the ball around the perimeter and probe the defense until the 2-3 overcommits and leaves a man standing alone on the other side of the court. Good coaches know how to exploit this in 35 seconds, better coaches know how to defensively rotate their players to outlast the offense.
via www.breakthroughbasketball.com
Take a look at the above picture. This is a good example of what most college coaches will do to try and beat the 2-3 and force the defense to overload one side. The arrows show how the defense should rotate to combat the offense. As you see in the diagram, the offense is trying to exploit every weak spot in the zone. They have two wing players set out wide, they’ve brought a player into the high post and they have a man on the block on the ball side posting up. The man in the high post forces a decision on Zeller at the 5 spot. Does he commit high to guard the free throw line and leave the post player in a advantageous match-up position against a forward or does he protect the rim and leave the high post vulnerable? This is where rotation is key.
Zeller should always and I repeat ALWAYS stay down and guard the man posting up. As the arrows show in the diagram, Zeller will shield the pass up the lane and
As he passes back to 1, Elston slides back down to help on 4, Oladipo jumps to the pass at 1. Hulls slides back into the lane to help Oladipo in case 1 drives and
As you can see, in just that one very specific instance, there are a ton of moving parts in a 2-3 zone and every player must know his role or the defense becomes useless. There is nothing more team oriented than trying to play a zone and if one guy doesn’t know his role, the whole thing will collapse. Rotation is key and court awareness is mandatory to keep guys from sliding in behind you for easy lay-ups and alley oops. However, a team that effectively runs a zone can frustrate an offense to no extent. There is a reason that the 2-3 is called the great equalizer. It doesn’t necessarily take athletes to guard athletes and it protects your post players from dumb fouls because the guards let their man get by them.
In the end, I’ll begrudgingly admit that the 2-3 is the perfect defense for
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I am not necessarily a purist. Like most Knight-era IU fans I am predisposed to favor man defense, but there certainly are many teams (Syracuse and Chaney-era Temple?) that have been very effective playing a zone. I think my main difficulty is the way we have used it, whipping it out for a possession or two. For instance, in the Nebraska game, IU went to the zone for one possession, promptly gave up a wide open three, and then never used it again, IIRC. As you note, a team with good ball movement can find good perimeter shots even against a well-played zone, let alone against a team that only dabbles in the zone. Sure, Nebraska isn’t a good shooting team statistically, but it doesn’t mean that their guards can’t hit wide open threes. Hell, anyone who practices enough can hit wide open threes.
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by John M (The Crimson Quarry) on Feb 13, 2012 9:44 AM EST reply actions
I respectfully disagree
You may be right on the specific instance with Nebraska. But on the whole, I like the idea of thowing a zone defense at a team sporadically. I also favor mixing in a full-court and half-court pressing defense. Mix it up. Keep the other team off balance and guessing about what you are doing. Don’t let them get comfortable.
by hoosierdaddynow on Feb 13, 2012 10:03 AM EST up reply actions
I think if we're going to use zone
we can’t just use it as a junk defense. We have to commit to it for long stretches of game time with man sprinkled in here and there.
-Contributing Writer at The Crimson Quarry.
Would you do that against Northwestern on Wednesday?
The Cats seem like the kind of team that could thrive against a zone.
by hoosierdaddynow on Feb 13, 2012 10:28 AM EST up reply actions
maybe not against NW
but that is because physically IU matches up with them very well. I think Watford manning up on Shurna and Oladipo on Crawford could neutralize a lot of the NW offense. I think Hulls can handle Sobolewski and Zeller can own the post. That leaves Elston/Sheehey/VJIII to slow down Cobb and Curletti. Is Mirkovic even back from his ankle issues yet?
-Contributing Writer at The Crimson Quarry.
that's about the time my dislike of the zone went from mild to abhorrent
since then though, IU has committed to playing the zone and I would venture to say they are more of a zone team than a man team now and you can see the drastic improvements over the last 2-3 games. Defense still isn’t good, but it has improved since the start of the conference season.
-Contributing Writer at The Crimson Quarry.
I approve of playing zone whenever Hulls is in the game.
He simply gets burned by any relatively quick guard if he has to play man on them. I hope he spends the whole summer working solely on his D.
"It's an easy game, man. Easy game."
~Edgerrin James
by 87 Rides A Surfboard on Feb 13, 2012 10:27 AM EST via mobile up reply actions
general question
Has anyone paid much attention to Roth’s D lately? I admit that I laughed it off when Crean said that Roth gets PT because of his D. My interest has been piqued as of late because I haven’t ‘noticed’ Roth much on D and I’m of the opinion that if I don’t notice a guard playing D then he’s playing well.
"It's an easy game, man. Easy game."
~Edgerrin James
by 87 Rides A Surfboard on Feb 13, 2012 10:33 AM EST via mobile reply actions
I think he's gone from bad to perfectly meh
he doesn’t get burned a lot but that is because he’s either given the easiest man to man assignment or they’re in a zone, where his hustle and added length and size over Hulls makes him less prone to get burned.
-Contributing Writer at The Crimson Quarry.
On the one hand, I'm with Knight about the zone: It can be beat by a properly coached team.
On the other, I’m also with Knight: If you need to use it, then use it (link is to a 1999 story about Knight throwing a zone on Northwestern in order to nullify one of their players). Just make damn sure you use it well.
I like Knight’s philosophy on basketball. I think many of those principles still hold true, even after all these years. But despite that, even he showed that philosophy takes a back seat to practicality at times, and that the important core principle is to use whatever tools you have at your possession to win.
I think the real lesson here is to properly utilize defensive concepts with the players you’ve got and work within your core principles while not staying so rock-hard adamant about specifics that you actually saddle your team with problems. You react to contingencies. And if that takes you places you didn’t initially expect, then so be it, but you do what you need to do in order to win. Notice that neither Knight back then, nor Crean even now fully abandons man defense. They just did what they had to do in order to get where they wanted to go.
And don’t forget personnel. You have to shape your philosophies against what you’ve got on the roster. You keep your core principles, but you’d better realize that there’s some shaping to do based on who you’ve got. There were some Temple teams in the past that I thought had the personnel to run a really great, sticky man-to-man D had Chaney back then relented, and sometimes I think it would’ve been interesting to see him try it, just because. And reaching even farther back, some of Tarkanian’s teams definitely had the physical skill to run any sort of defense or offense that Tark could come up with; it’s just that he knew a specific one type of game the best and coached it the best, so that’s what you saw on the floor. But in both cases, those teams were able to do anything, so it didn’t hurt them to keep to their coaches core philosophies without changing. Whereas on the flipside, I was just flabbergastingly impressed that some of Knights less heralded teams were able to remain competitive in a man D when their personnel setup was just screaming for zone (shows you what kind of coach Knight was, to be able to do that to that degree), but a lesser coach would just plain have to bend. In the end, the real key is that you should indeed develop core principles, but not “abandon” them as much as apply them as best you can in the face of contigencies and work as best as you can to maintain principles while doing what’s needed to win. Even Knight did what he had to do, and if he could throw on a 2-3, then anyone can. Remember this: A pure zone was not really that far outside of Knight’s thinking; he always said that his man D was built with zone principles. And he showed it. You see those same principles in play in Duke’s defense as coached by Krzyzewski. So it’s not like he wasn’t already borrowing from that philosophy to begin with.
So, in a man-to-man D still the best? You betcha. No offense to good ole Chaney when he was still coaching, and Pitino when he throws a zone on, but it just plain is. But is there room for flexibility? Again, yes. Knight showed that there was, and again if he could do it, anyone could.
The important thing is to defend well, and not lose sight of your team’s core principles. Even if those players feel like strangers in a strange land at times. Your team’s core principles will guide players through those deviations, and they’ll grow from it.
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"First they came for the ugly, and I did not speak out because I was not ugly.
Then they came for the nerds, and I did not speak out because D&D IS A RESPECTABLE GAME WITH A LARGE PLAYERBASE OK MOM???
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because let's be real they always come for the Jews.
Then they came for me, and I did not speak out because they actually came for me back when they came for the nerds."
--
"How can a pickup truck contain enough mass to unfold into a towering machine? I say if Ringling Brothers can get 15 clowns into a Volkswagen, anything is possible."
you just EMH'd the shit outta that post.
"It's an easy game, man. Easy game."
~Edgerrin James
by 87 Rides A Surfboard on Feb 13, 2012 11:12 AM EST via mobile up reply actions
I feel like I have been to the mountaintop
/enlightened
by hoosierdaddynow on Feb 13, 2012 11:35 AM EST up reply actions
Heh...
Thanks, guys.
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"First they came for the ugly, and I did not speak out because I was not ugly.
Then they came for the nerds, and I did not speak out because D&D IS A RESPECTABLE GAME WITH A LARGE PLAYERBASE OK MOM???
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because let's be real they always come for the Jews.
Then they came for me, and I did not speak out because they actually came for me back when they came for the nerds."
--
"How can a pickup truck contain enough mass to unfold into a towering machine? I say if Ringling Brothers can get 15 clowns into a Volkswagen, anything is possible."
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