Zone defenese

[Cyclonepride]

Not a fan of the zone, but I do like mixing it up to keep the offense off balance.

 

[siklon]

I remember the WM era when he would play zone for long stretches, sometimes entire games. Would drive me nuts. I recall one specific game I went to at Hilton against A&M when they ended up shooting something crazy like 75% from the floor in the second half because our guys would just slap at the ball as A&M's players would drive by them, instead of, you know, using their feet to stay in front of them and block the path to the hoop.

Zone is OK to use strategically to throw the other team off, but should never be used as a long term defensive plan.

While I agree with you in that I don't prefer seeing zone. Comparing the WM years to CFH is just asinine. Morgan was a recruiter, not a coach.

Also Jim Boeheim and his 948 career wins would argue otherwise as a long term defensive plan...

 

[DistrictCyclone]

I remember the WM era when he would play zone for long stretches, sometimes entire games. Would drive me nuts. I recall one specific game I went to at Hilton against A&M when they ended up shooting something crazy like 75% from the floor in the second half because our guys would just slap at the ball as A&M's players would drive by them, instead of, you know, using their feet to stay in front of them and block the path to the hoop.

Zone is OK to use strategically to throw the other team off, but should never be used as a long term defensive plan.

I agree completely. The zone has become increasingly obsolete with the advent of the 3-point shot, but it retains value in throwing off the opposing offense or countering a play that was drawn up specifically for a man defense. You'd expect a guy like WM to run it a lot, being a Syracuse/Boeheim disciple, but yeah, I don't understand why anyone would run it for more than a few minutes at a time.

 

[ISUAlum2002]

While I agree with you in that I don't prefer seeing zone. Comparing the WM years to CFH is just asinine. Morgan was a recruiter, not a coach.

I wasn't comparing the WM years to CFH.

 

[Doc]

I remember the WM era when he would play zone for long stretches, sometimes entire games. Would drive me nuts. I recall one specific game I went to at Hilton against A&M when they ended up shooting something crazy like 75% from the floor in the second half because our guys would just slap at the ball as A&M's players would drive by them, instead of, you know, using their feet to stay in front of them and block the path to the hoop.

Zone is OK to use strategically to throw the other team off, but should never be used as a long term defensive plan.

Morgan's team that went to NCAAs had the 6th best defensive efficiency in the country according to Ken Pomeroy. They had Homan in the middle to challenge a lot of the easy buckets, the zone kept that team with very little depth out of foul trouble, and they made up for giving up some easy buckets by having the freedom to go for a lot of steals and by not fouling as much as a lot man teams do. They also did really well against 3s, which is probably somewhat due to luck.

Things went terribly wrong the next year when they swapped in Ross Marsden, a sophomore Jiri Hubalek, and an ill Shawn Taggart in for in Homan and Staple.

I think Syracuse does well with the zone because they recruit the personnel for it, but there are very few teams that can recruit that much height that also has offensive talent.

So yeah, I guess I mostly agree. It should hardly ever be used as a long-term defensive plan.