With Jim Boeheim retired, can zone defense still work in college basketball?
Andrew Mccoy Jim Boeheim might have coached more possessions of zone defense than any coach in college basketball history. The 2-3 zone helped win him a national championship in 2003 and reach four other Final Fours during a 47-year run as the head coach at Syracuse. So when Boeheim is asked what defense would he run if he had to start a new program in 2023, his answer may come as a surprise.
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“Man-to-man,” he says before the question is even finished being asked. “Just too many good shooters. Too many coaches that know how to attack zones. I would try to play almost 90 percent man, but I’d like to have a good enough zone to play 10-20 percent.”
Boeheim didn’t believe he had the personnel to have success playing man in recent years, but the floor spacing in the modern game made him at least contemplate making the switch. Since the men’s NCAA 3-point line moved back before the start of the 2019-20 season, it has changed the geometry of the floor. When the Orange won the NCAA Tournament in 2003, most teams had one or two shooters on the floor and space was limited inside the line. Boeheim says he could scheme to take away one or two shooters. Now teams take more 3s and put more shooters on the floor.
“Coaches allow players to shoot further out,” Baylor coach Scott Drew says. “That’s made it harder to zone as well, because usually you’re open from 25 (feet).”
Drew used to lean a lot on the zone but went away from it in 2019-20, adopting the no-middle, man-to-man defense as his primary attack. The next year, he won a national championship with the Bears.
The analytics have gone in the wrong direction for the Orange over the last four seasons, when their average finish in adjusted defensive efficiency was No. 146, according to KenPom.com. The fade happened fast. From 2010-2016, the Orange posted an average adjusted defense finish inside the top 15 nationally. But Syracuse’s defense the past two seasons were the worst of Boeheim’s career, and the end of the regular season was a prime example for how the math is simply working against the zone. Syracuse had a four-game stretch when opponents made 61 3-pointers at a 42.7 percent clip, and the Orange allowed 1.36 points per possession.
Syracuse's adjusted defensive efficiency
| Year | KenPom rank |
|---|---|
2022-23 | 185 |
2021-22 | 207 |
2020-21 | 77 |
2019-20 | 116 |
2018-19 | 30 |
2017-18 | 5 |
Some of the slippage happened because of personnel. “It wasn’t as good because we were slow,” Boeheim says. “We didn’t have good team speed. But if you don’t have good team speed in man-to-man, you’re in the same boat. It really wasn’t the zone; it was just the people in the zone.”
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But in the next breath, he questions the viability of zone defense in 2023.
“It’s harder to play all zone really in college now,” he says.
The beauty of college basketball is the multitude of styles. It’s what differentiates the NCAA from the NBA, and for what’s felt like forever Boeheim has run a defense that became his creation. But when Boeheim retired abruptly on March 8, the identity of Syracuse basketball may have gone with him. Is it possible his retirement also marked the end of the zone as a primary defense at the high-major level?
New Syracuse coach Adrian Autry spent 12 seasons as an assistant for Boeheim. This is the time of year when coaching staffs sit in an office and strategize how they want their team to look the next season. Autry has already decided it’s time to change the defensive plan.
“You want to be balanced, obviously, but I think we’ll lean heavily on man-to-man,” he says.
He’s not the only Boeheim disciple who is adapting. Mike Hopkins, who was once the Syracuse coach-in-waiting, took the zone to Washington but no longer plays it exclusively. Across the country, there has been a similar decline in the frequency of zone being played. During the 2015-16 season, 70 teams played zone at least one-third of their defensive possessions, according to per-possession logging by Synergy. Last season, only 15 teams played zone as much as one-third of their possessions. The teams that zone the most are usually at the lower levels.
Teams that zoned the most in 2022-23
| Zone frequency | |
|---|---|
Syracuse | 90.3 |
Merrimack | 90 |
Elon | 77.5 |
Washington | 72.7 |
Northern Kentucky | 71.4 |
Tulane | 70.7 |
Oakland | 69.5 |
Bryant | 54.7 |
Mississippi Valley State | 54.6 |
Detroit | 51.4 |
The fear for most coaches is the 3-point shot, and that’s the first reason Autry cites in his decision to play less zone. At its best, Syracuse was long up front and its guards could cover both the 3-point line between the slots and make it difficult to enter the ball into the middle.
“When those guys are so extended because guys can shoot so far, it just opens the court up,” Autry says. “When they get it into the middle part of your zone, you wind up playing three-on-three, but three-on-three with someone kind of coming down in rotation, so they’ve got a little bit advantage.”
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The rotations used to be easier because everything was so compact. Look at the spacing in the 2003 national championship game.
Aaron Miles, who has the ball, made 24 3s that season and shot 24.5 percent from deep. Syracuse is not worried about him shooting the ball, especially from several feet behind the line. Josh Pace, in the middle of the screen, is pointing to the corner to alert Hakeem Warrick that he needs to keep an eye on Keith Langford in the corner. But Warrick doesn’t even need to extend too far out. Langford was more of a slasher and made only 22 3s that year.
Now let’s fast forward to Syracuse’s game at Clemson on Feb. 22 of last season:
Clemson places two shooters on the wings, spaced out several feet behind the 3-point line. Hunter Tyson, at the top of the screen, made 83 3-pointers in 2023 and shot 40.5 percent from deep. Alex Hemenway (No. 12) is a 47.1 percent 3-point shooter. The Syracuse wings must respect them and are positioned above the free-throw line, which was a rarity 20 years ago. Chase Hunter (No. 1) is a 35.6 percent 3-point shooter and will attempt nine shots from deep in this game. P.J. Hall is a 6-foot-10 center who can pass and shot nearly 40 percent from 3. Ian Schieffelin, in the middle of the zone, is the only real non-shooter on the floor, but he’s a good passer who will have six assists in this game. Clemson attempted 36 3s and made 14 of them en route to a 91-73 win.
“The skill level of the guys that shoot the basketball now, they’ve been encouraged (to shoot),” Autry says, “where those used to be bad shots. No one’s saying that’s a bad shot now.”
One of Syracuse’s weaknesses is an almost magnetic response to where the ball is, leading to long closeouts.
This is where zone offenses have gotten smarter, using actions like screening the top of the zone that attract two to the ball. Boeheim says Pittsburgh under Ben Howland in the early 2000s was the first team to start screening the top of the zone. Now it’s become more common and even harder to deal with when the screener is a big who can shoot, like Duke had last season with Kyle Filipowski:
Actions that beat over-helping man-to-man also seem to work against the zone. When Clemson gets the ball to the short corner, its movement away from the ball is similar to what offenses do with a baseline drive with the shooter on the opposite side drifting to the corner.
“That’s using all the space that you can on the floor,” Clemson coach Brad Brownell says. “You’re stretching the defense as far as possible, right?”
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Boeheim adjusted by extending his wings farther out and installing more matchup principles, but that led to smarter use of off-ball screening by opponents. The concepts are similar to how you attack man. Zone offense used to be patterned. “(Now) there’s been more movement stuff,” Boeheim says. “A little bit more diversity in what people are doing, changing the post.”
A post player used to always be in the middle spot, but coaches are smarter now in who they put in that position. When Gonzaga tried to go zone during the 2021 national championship game, Drew placed guard MaCio Teague in the middle of the defense. Teague shot Gonzaga back to man-to-man.
Once Teague started scoring, defenders at the top of the zone became weary of getting too far extended. That led to a deep open look for Jared Butler.
That shot was simply a result of Teague’s gravity. Most of the best 3-point looks come from getting the ball to the middle, which instinctively makes the defenders suck in. When the shots start falling, the zone will overcorrect and allow easier looks from the wings or around the basket.
Boeheim could once school his guys to stay compact and simply stayed attached to the best shooter. Part of the zone’s weaponry was the psychological warfare for teams that missed a few jumpers in a row.
“If you’re not making shots, then you get a little hesitant and that can be problematic,” Brownell says. “And then they don’t come out quite as far. It’s a little more challenging to get the ball to the high post and the shot clock starts to go and the anxiety ratchets up a little bit.”
Boeheim could always bank on this happening enough that the math over an entire season was going to bend his way. But Autry points to Stephen Curry’s impact on basketball. Players and coaches think the game differently now. The anxiety players used to feel is not what it once was.
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“Now they just let it fly,” Boeheim says. “Before, if they miss three or four, they start thinking about it. Now they just keep firing. They don’t think about it. It’s a different mentality.”
Autry says he still plans to play about 30 percent zone next season, but what that zone looks like could be different. It could be more of a matchup look, but he’s coy in divulging too much. Autry has been studying some other zone defenses, including Merrimack’s.
If there’s a man in the game as devout to the zone as Boeheim once was, it’s Merrimack coach Joe Gallo.
Gallo was hired at Merrimack in 2016; three years into his tenure, the school in North Andover, Mass., jumped from Division II to Division I. The Warriors won the Northeast Conference in the school’s first D1 season and did so again last season. (Merrimack won the NEC tournament in March but was not eligible for the NCAA Tournament as a team transitioning from D2. Fairleigh Dickinson instead received the league’s automatic bid and upset No. 1 seed Purdue in the first round).
Merrimack’s statistical blueprint looks nothing like what we’ve come to expect from a zone. Syracuse’s opponents attempted more than 48 percent of their shots from deep each of the last two seasons. Merrimack has ranked in the top 75 of defensive 3-point rate each of the last four seasons, ranking 22nd four years ago and 39th this past year.
“I think Syracuse is OK with their bigger guards contesting long 3s,” Gallo says. “We have smaller guys up top, and we just run people off the 3-point line. One of our big things is no 3s, where a lot of people think, oh, you play zone, what happens if you play a good shooting team? We love playing good shooting teams because we’re going to run them off the 3-point line and get them to do something else.”
The Gallo and Boeheim zones, when at their best, share one similarity: They create lots of turnovers. Boeheim has had 12 top-25 defenses since 1997, according to KenPom’s database. Ten of those had defensive turnover rates that ranked in the top 100. Merrimack has ranked in the top 40 of that stat in each of its four D1 seasons and led the country in turnover rate this past year.
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How they get there is different. Boeheim always tried to recruit length at every position, and that positional length at the top and the wings led to lots of deflections. There’s an obvious correlation between team height with the number of turnovers created and shots blocked by his defense.
At the low-major level, it’s hard to recruit taller guards, so Gallo has targeted fast undersized guards who have great instincts for stealing the ball.
Merrimack also has different tactics for when the ball gets to the middle. Syracuse’s way of playing this was for the center to sit back in the paint as the rim protector, willing to allow an opposing big man to take that shot.
“The hardest thing to play against is where you got a guy there that’s a good passer,” Boeheim says.
Merrimack attacks when the ball gets to the middle. The center closes hard, and then the wings quickly recover to the short corner and opposite wing, which are the first two areas the middle man is taught to look.
“We’re not baiting you into shooting that (shot from the middle),” Gallo explains. “We don’t really want to give up anything, so we’re like blitzing that as if that’s the quarterback, and we don’t want to give him a ton of vision to make passes.
“Someone who plays zone is going to say, oh, don’t let it go to the nail, right? (The “nail” is at the middle of the free-throw line.) But we know playing it every game that at some point it gets to the nail almost every possession. So we’ve probably spent 75 percent of our time working on what to do after it goes to the nail.”
When the ball goes to that spot, Merrimack matches up, similar to how Rick Pitino teaches his zone defense.
Pitino played a lot of zone during his years at Louisville, including during the Cardinals’ 2013 national championship season, and that defense often created confusion. “A matchup zone gets all the benefits of playing against the zone offense, but you’re basically playing man-to-man,” Pitino says.
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Gallo’s zone is a mix of what Pitino calls a 2-3 “bumping” zone (the Syracuse version) and a matchup. In Gallo’s creation, as soon as the ball leaves the middle, Merrimack returns to its zone shape.
“There’s not a lot of holes in that next thing,” former Fairleigh Dickinson coach and current Iona coach Tobin Anderson says. “You gotta beat them up possession by possession. It feels like every possession you’re facing the same damn thing. And you don’t get easy baskets that you might get in offensive transition or against man-to-man. If I’m being honest, I don’t enjoy playing against them.”
Anderson says his coaches watched every possession of Merrimack’s zone before each of their three games this season, which is another advantage to facing a unique defense that wasn’t as easily available in past eras. With video editing software like Synergy, coaches can quickly pull up what they want to watch and learn from others. FDU, for instance, took a lesson from Vermont in how to attack the middle of the zone, putting a guard in that spot and using a retreat dribble to pull the center out further from the bucket and then trying to beat the center off the dribble.
“If you dribble out, how far is that man going to come? At some point they have to rotate back and the guard takes him,” Anderson says. “It just kind distorts the zone. Some guys catch the ball at the high post, they can’t play one-on-one there. We’ve had success against it by getting the right guy at the high post that’s either a matchup problem or can make plays out there.”
The other weakness Anderson points out is defensive rebounding. Syracuse has ranked in the 300s in defensive rebounding rate in each of the last five seasons. Merrimack has ranked 345th or worst in three of its four D1 seasons.
“But if you turn it over,” Anderson says, “you don’t get a chance to offensive rebound.”
This is where the best zone teams make up for their vulnerability on the offensive glass. Syracuse also evened the score by rarely fouling and getting to the line more often than its opponent. Merrimack had a low defensive free-throw rate this past season but hasn’t been as foul-averse as the Orange, likely because of its aggressiveness going for steals.
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The teams that give Merrimack the most problems, Gallo says, are those that play with less structure. “And just a group of confidence guys that just kind of let it fly have hurt us the most,” he says.
Gallo has been giddy the last few weeks watching the Miami Heat have success playing zone during their surprising NBA playoff run. Going into Wednesday’s NBA Finals Game 3, the Heat had played 284 possessions of zone in the postseason, allowing 0.923 points per possession with the zone compared to 0.998 with its man-to-man, per Synergy.
“Most NBA teams go zone and they’re just kind of doing it as a curveball and they just kind of stand in spots and hope you miss,” Gallo says. “It’s pretty apparent that Miami actually works on what they do and spend a lot of time on it.”
Boeheim believes it’s hard to play two different defenses at an elite level because there’s just not enough practice time.
“The only team that really has ever played both equally well was Georgetown when John (Thompson Jr.) was there because they had four-and-a-half hour defensive practices every day,” Boeheim says. “There’s been very few teams that have been good at playing two defenses. It’s not that easy.”
But the Heat provide some hope that it’s possible to not just play two kinds of defenses well but to play a zone against one of the best shooting teams in the world. The Celtics ranked second in the NBA in 3-pointers made this past season, and the zone worked against them even when they had five shooters on the floor.
Gallo has re-watched the Heat’s zone possessions this postseason and felt even more empowered that the defense can work in today’s game if the activity level is there. He says most coaches stay away from zone because they think it’s hard to determine where the breakdown occurred. In man-to-man, there’s always someone to blame. Gallo believes it’s the same in a zone. It’s not hard for him to grade out his players.
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“(The zone) is holding our guys accountable for their position,” he says.
If Gallo gets a job at a bigger school, he says he’ll stick with the zone. Pitino barely played any zone at Iona because he says the center is the middle of the wheel and directs everyone, and he didn’t have a player in that spot who could handle that responsibility. This season at St. John’s, he’ll have an old team capable of the communication it takes. His matchup zone will make a return.
Autry points out that, like fashion, everything is cyclical in basketball. What once was cool, then uncool, will be cool again. It’s a copycat sport. And the Heat’s success in the NBA playoffs could prompt the zone’s resurrection.
“A lot of times you’ll watch the playoffs and certain things evolve and coaches say, hey, we can do that,” Pitino says. “No different than when Indiana started with their passing game back with Bob Knight. It became the rage: the motion offense. Anything that’s very, very effective, television brings it about and everybody tries to tinker with it.”
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos: Isaiah Vazquez and Jeffrey Brown / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
