ORANGE ZONE ‘A NIGHTMARE’
Aztecs haven’t faced the 2-3 all season long, and Boeheim will put tweaks in it for them
If Syracuse’s famed 2-3 zone defense stymies San Diego State in their opening NCAA Tournament game on Friday night in Indianapolis, if the Aztecs are flummoxed by its unorthodox rotations, if they can’t get the ball to the high post, if they keep getting trapped in the short corner, they can curse the Le Moyne College Dolphins. They ruined it for everybody.
Le Moyne is a small private school in Syracuse, and Orange coach Jim Boeheim graciously offered to play an exhibition to start the 200910 season. And figured, what the heck, just for kicks, why not, let’s try man-to-man defense for the second half.
The Dolphins shot 54.5 percent against an Orange team that later in the season would be No. 1 in The Associated Press poll and won 8279.
“I’ve seen enough,” Boeheim said afterward. Zone it is.
It is why coaches annually wince on Selection Sunday when they see their team paired with Syracuse, knowing exactly what’s coming, knowing three, four, five days of practice and film sessions still might not be enough. Fewer and fewer teams play zone defense in college basketball these days, meaning you have fewer and fewer opportunities to face it. SDSU has seen it once all season, back in January in a pair of games against an overmatched, undermanned Air Force team that finished 5-20.
And that was a 3-2 matchup zone, with different concepts and, ahem, levels of athleticism.
“We haven’t played against 2-3 zone the entire season,” Dutcher said Sunday after his sixth-seeded Aztecs drew the 11th-seeded Orange. “We’re going to see one for 40 minutes. It’s just that’s what they do. Anything that you do, they’ve seen 1,000 times. There’s no set play they haven’t seen, there’s no rotation they haven’t made.”
No program among the 350-plus in Division I is more identified with a single tactic, which only adds to the mystique.
“It’s a nightmare,” commentator Dick Vitale once said. “I think people psychologically have a problem with it before they even play. It’s points in the book, just the mental preparation other teams need before playing it.”
Boeheim is in his 45th season at Syracuse, but this is not the 45th season he has played exclusively zone. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that he convinced himself spending precious practice time on one defense was better than splitting it between two. He picked the defense that was going out of fashion, then added unconventional twists that it makes it even more of an anomaly.
“As the years have evolved, not many teams are playing zone,” Boeheim said a few years ago, “and when they play or practice against it, it’s a false sense of security because you’re not playing against our defense. It’s much like when Georgetown had Patrick Ewing. You could practice against (them), anything you wanted, but at the end of the day when you made your play and made your move and you went to shoot it, he blocked it. You get a false sense of security sometimes at practice.”
The first thing to understand about Boeheim’s zone is not everybody can run it, just like Phil Jackson’s vaunted triangle offense works a lot better with Kobe Bryant than all the suburban high school teams that tried to run it with 5-foot-10, floor-bound guards. Boeheim recruits specifically to it: big, thick guards who can fight over screens; long, athletic forwards who can cover ground quickly; and centers with the rare ability to block
shots while also defending dribble penetration from the high post.
The second thing to understand is it does the exact opposite of what every other zone does when the ball is entered into the high post, the Holy Grail of zonebusting techniques. Instead of collapsing onto the ball like a magnet, Syracuse’s zone fans out to the shooters while the middle man steps up to cover the high post by himself.
And instead of keeping its forwards on the back line, they often extend to the perimeter until the guards can recover and “bump” them back to the baseline. Try to exploit the space behind them, and they’ll trap in the short corner.
Boeheim describes another of the zone’s counterintuitive principles on a video from a coaching clinic:
“Defend the 3-point shot with everything you have. Now, that’s exactly the opposite of why we started playing zone 25, 35 years ago. You played it then for what reason? To protect the basket, take away big guys. You couldn’t guard somebody inside, you played zone. That’s not why we play zone. We play zone to take away the 3point shot.”
So the strategy of shooting you out of a zone is exactly what they want you to do. The idea is less to prevent 3-point shots than to allow, even encourage, contested 3-point shots.
The Orange annually rank near the bottom of Div. I in the percentage of an opponent’s total shots that come behind the arc (they’re 339th this season) but they rank near the top in defensive 3-point field goal percentage. Take a lot, make a little.
And it is in that statistical space where Friday’s game might be decided. In seniors Jordan Schakel and Terrell Gomez, SDSU has two of the top 10 active national leaders in 3-point accuracy.
“Usually that’s why people in our league don’t zone us,” Dutcher said. “Obviously, that’s a great respect for the shooters we have. Now, Syracuse zones everybody, so they go against shooters all the time, and they number them and say: ‘This shooter and this shooter are not going to get shots. These are the two that aren’t going to beat us.’ ”
Adding to the intrigue is Boeheim, who will make specific defensive tweaks tailored to the opponent’s strengths, will have no film clips this season of the Aztecs playing against a 2-3 zone to better understand how they might attack it.
“We just have to find the holes in their zone,” Schakel said. “There are holes in every zone. No defense is perfect.”
And here’s the thing: Syracuse’s hasn’t been recently.
The Orange ranked in the top 20 of defensive efficiency according to the Kenpom metric for seven straight seasons between 2009 and 2016. In the last five years, they’ve done it only once and been closer to 100 three times.
They were 116th last season.
They’re 89th this season. After Pitt dropped 67 points on them in the second half in January, Boeheim admitted: “Our defense was probably the worst I’ve seen it since I’ve been here.”
One literally big reason is 6-foot-10 starting center Bourama Sidibe hurt his knee four minutes into the season opener and has played only 11 minutes since (and not at all since Feb. 6). His replacement, 6-10 Marek Dolezaj, is more suited for the outside of the zone than middle, and the other candidates on the roster are too young to master it.
But no one has escaped blame for the uncharacteristic lapses.
“It’s not one, two, three people that are giving up 52 in a half,” Buddy Boeheim, the coach’s son, said after an 85-71 loss at Duke last month. “It’s everyone.”
It has led some to speculate the problems go deeper, that elite players are shying away from Syracuse because NBA scouts can’t properly evaluate their manto-man defensive skills, that the modern game is too spaced with too many shooters for the Syracuse zone to be consistently effective. Washington went 5-21 with it this season under longtime Boeheim assistant Mike Hopkins.
Then again, Syracuse became the first 10 seed to reach the Final Four in 2016. It was an 11 seed in 2018 and got to the Sweet 16, flummoxing teams that don’t regularly see the zone and didn’t have enough time to prepare for it — mentally or tactically.
“You don’t have that decision that people are always saying to me, well, why don’t you switch to your man to man,” Boeheim said in 2013 after upsetting top-seeded Indiana en route to another Final Four by holding opponents to 34, 60, 50 and 39 points. “Well, you can’t switch to something you don’t have. They stopped asking that question.”