Question for MGoCoaches: Why don't more teams run the 2-3 like 'Cuse
As title states, I'm just wondering why, like the triple option or the air raid in football, there isn't at least one team per major conference that does something resembling what Boeheim does, and truly commit to the 2-3, given his repeated tournament and regular season success? Is it really that difficult to find the athletes capable of running it at a truly high level? I know one of his longtime assistants just brought it to Washington and seems committed to it, and they had a successful year, relative to the disaster they had in the last year under Romar.
You need fantastic length and athelticism to run a zone like they do. The wings need to both be highly athletic 6'7 and up guys, your center needs to be an elite shot blocker and the two guards at top need to be long and athletic too to make passing out of the middle difficult. Its difficult to build that sort of defense and a cohesive offense out of the same players
Thank you for this, it helped me see the bigger picture of it.
March 19th, 2018 at 11:55 PM ^
These are Syracuse's height ranks out of 350ish teams in college basketball the past 6 years with defensive efficency ranks in ():
2013: 2nd (6th)
2014: 10th (13th)
2015: 11th (20th)
2016: 11th (18th)
2017: 11th (119th!!)
2018: 1st!! (5th)
Players that tall and athletic just aren't that easy to come by. So if you can't be one of the tallest teams in basketball, you're going to struggle in a zone because zones allow a crap ton of open threes. And even if you're really tall your going to be susceptible to getting bombed on any given night.
Make no mistake, Syracuse's zone did not beat MSU. MSU simply missed an absurd number of wide open threes. With the number of good 3 pt shooters these days, zones are probably becoming less effective and are probably becoming more rare. So while Cuse is going to pull off some upsets here and there, they lose a ton of games, especially to conference opponents that prepare more for them.
It's easy to run a mediocre zone defense. But it's very difficult to run a *good* zone defense, because zones generally have "weak points" that can be exploited by a good offense (often near the foul line, or in the short corner). So basically, you need serious length on defense, and you need to spend a LOT of time teaching rotations, responsibilities, etc...
Additionally, defensive rebounding is challenging, and zone teams are prone to giving up a lot of offensive boards. This is due to box out assignments. When you're playing man, it's easy to determine who you should be boxing out. When you're playing zone? It's easy for signals to get crossed, and an offensive player slip through the cracks and grab offensive boards. We saw the "nightmare scenario" of this in the MSU/Syracuse game, when State had 20-ish offensive rebounds, and was able to generate 50% more shot attempts than Syracuse.
March 19th, 2018 at 11:09 PM ^
As much as people want to point to Syracuse's zone dominance here, MSU still might have won if they'd made just 1 more 3 pointer out of 29 (!!!) total misses, or 1 extra field goal out of the 15 they missed to end the game. Bad luck, poor scheming, and offensive choking all played a role too.
It's not inherently superior. Boeheim has done a good job with it consistently bringing in long athletic kids specifically to run it, and while he consistently has an excellent defense, he is also then defining the make up of your team based off what players suit his zone best but not necessarily offense. Whereas, I'd say a Beilein is looking primarily for offensive skill sets first.
March 20th, 2018 at 12:04 AM ^
They did cheat thier asses off, but they were fun as hell to watch! Balls to the wall offensively, and that Amoeba defense flowed more naturally than most man defenses do today. Ask Coach K about that defense...
Because i don't ever want to see another game like i sat through on Sunday with Syracuse and Michigan state. Although the outcome was tasty
will tell you!!! One that Fizzle has never solved. . .
If Bama or FSU decided at spring camp that this year they will be triple option, they would dominate. Problem is if they tried to stick with it they would lose their recruiting advantage. Players that want to move on and get paid won’t set themselves aside for the team. If teams got paid instead of players there would be variants of option football played in the NFL.
March 20th, 2018 at 10:26 AM ^
that the blue bloods of football of the late 60's through the 70's ran their own version of the triple option called the wishbone?
Alabama already dominates. Why would they change their offense?
Third, while the flexbone offense is difficult to defend, similar to the Air Raid, it is an absolute nightmare for your own defense in terms of preparation.
Lastly, Paul Johnson has, overall, underperformed the previous Georgia Tech football coaches dating back to 1995:
Paul Johnson (Option): 76-54--58.5%
George O'Leary and Chan Gailey (Non Option): 97-63--60.6%
March 20th, 2018 at 12:35 AM ^
because yes, part of the reason for Syracuse's success running zones is that team's are less familiar/less used to playing against it, but having a good zone is dependent pretty much entirely on having very long, athletic (rare) players to run it.
In football, the triple option is the opposite. Teams that run it usually do because it can be run with cut blocks and smaller, more abundantly available linemen and QBs that can run but don't need to pass accurately (also far more abundant).
Playing a zone like Syracuse is more like playing pro-style offense in college football these days. Why don't more teams run a pro-style offense? Because there just aren't many good QBs that can run it effectively or mountainous o-linemen that can protect statue QBs. That's probably a better comparison.
It took Spike and Burke hitting a number of steph curry threes and an outstanding performance from McGary for us to win a game against a much less talented team by 5. We didn't exactly dominate the zone. We got out to a big lead at one point but basketball games are 40 minutes.
March 20th, 2018 at 12:36 AM ^
answer.
Rick's American and Seth make good points.
A couple things to add.
I'd say that the 2-3 zone is, in fact, very popular. After man, it's the most popular D out there. There are lots of other zones and hybrids - 3-2, 1-3-1, 3-2 with a slider, 2-1-2, 1-2-2, box-and-1, triangle-and-2, etc. But nothing approaches 2-3. So, it is quite popular. We run it, Duke runs it, tons of teams run it.
Also, man is more versatile. Man can adjust to teams that love to shoot the 3, teams that love to pound it in the paint, teams with 2 stars and 10 shmucks, and everything in between. 2-3 zone is much harder to adjust because your positions are set and mor rigid; they're not a response to the offense. So a hot shooting team can pretty much kill a zone team, as is often noted. I've even seen Syracuse come out of their zone in response to a 3 barrage.
Rebounding is tough out of a zone, like lots of people said, because finding a target to box out is hard.
There is also the matter of learning zone. In some ways it's easier to learn: help side d is already in position because the position is set, for example, and extending the baseline wing up and then bumping him down as the top man comes over is pretty easy to get installed. But teaching how to react to a high post entry pass is really hard, and the way that Syracuse obstructs the short corner is elite and hard to replicate.
Personnel is not quite as hard as some people are making out, I think, but there is a certain type.
On my teams, I always preferred man but used 2-3 several times per game out of timeouts, on an OB under, after a made free throw, etc. as a change of pace. I preferred man because of the flexibility to adjust to the other team, the ability to always have your best athlete on their best athlete (and your worst on their worst), rebounding advantage, and because if it's clicking you can get in the heads of the other team and dominate them like nothing else. Also, if you have better athletes, man is just easier to play. But if I thought we were the less athletic team, sometimes I'd go predominantly zone because you don't have to be as quick. Also, it's easier to hide a guy in foul trouble in a zone. Finally if we were running something like a press, it's sometimes easier to fall back into a zone.
March 19th, 2018 at 11:25 PM ^
March 20th, 2018 at 12:37 AM ^
work out for you?
March 21st, 2018 at 12:43 AM ^
Man, your best athlete probably didn't progress as much as a defender as he could have.
We had two elite ball defenders on our team this year. Also elite ball handlers. They went after each other in practice every day. By the end of the year they were on another level and opponents literally had never seen a team that could shut down their top two ball-handlers. Even though we were small, we were able to upset a couple teams in the tournament (well, we didn't think they were upsets because we knew most teams had never had to deal with two elite defenders) because of our excellent man defense and forcing teams' third and fourth options to produce.
Excellent on-ball defenders create nightmares for teams... and is why Michigan has a chance to win it all this year.
Good summary.
However, if you cannot play man, you cannot play defense, which is at least 40% mental, and at least 50% effort and desire.
This is a good video.
March 19th, 2018 at 10:43 PM ^
Meh.
Some good points, but that guy's evaluation of what is an 'easy shot' is way off in my opinion.
March 20th, 2018 at 12:20 AM ^
great analysis and I totally agree with you.. He called "good" shots Jared Sullinger shooting over 7 footer in the post. While that may be a decent shot for Jared Sullinger, it's not a very good shot for most players on most teams. Cuse is always a very good shot blocking team because of their length and the fact that the zone ensures they have someone protecting the rim on dribble drives.
This was also like 6 years ago. Basketball has changed a decent amount even in that time in terms of what constitutes a good shot because more guys are better at making threes from further out than ever before.
March 19th, 2018 at 10:04 PM ^
March 19th, 2018 at 10:42 PM ^
Impossible to work now with all the damn millennials not caring about or understanding the game.
March 20th, 2018 at 12:22 AM ^
since you're interacting more with your teammates on switches and such.
March 19th, 2018 at 10:42 PM ^
Did that fact bother you?
March 19th, 2018 at 11:31 PM ^
Syracuse has been to 5 Final Fours in 42 years under Boeheim (even a coach like Izzo has been to more in about half the time), and only got a title by getting a generational college talent in Carmelo Anthony, and even then, Syracuse needed Kansas to inexplicably go 12/30 on FTs to win by 3. The zone hasn't brought Syracuse an uncommon level of success despite all the talent that's passed through the program. In many ways, you can argue his program has actually underachieved.
March 20th, 2018 at 12:25 AM ^
and he's been even worse lately with 12, 13, 15 losses in each of the last four years. It's a defense that will catch teams by surprise because it isn't used much, but it requires such specific personnel that he's making too many tradeoffs on offense just to remain good at it.
I'm not sure Syracuse gets the great talent all that frequently, depending on how you evaluate "talent", I guess.
They get long athletes to be sure, but I don't think they get a lot of guys with outstanding offensive skills. I believe that's a negative feature of Boeheim's fealty to the 2-3. Kids that can score the ball know what they will be spending their time on in practice at Syracuse and go elsewhere.
It can be difficult to separate players' offensive skills from the mostly unimaginative offense Syracuse runs. The school's recruiting has declined in recent years with probation and other aspects, but as I said, Boeheim has been there 42 years, and other those years, the school has had loads of top 50-100-level players to come through. That being said, I do agree that the zone isn't a great recruiting tool into today's age, which is all the more reason why so few schools use it full-time or as a primary defense.