RealGM

I'm sure everybody noticed Rockets playing 2-3 zone in stretches against the Raptors last night. It looked like a game-time adjustment by Rick Adelman and his comments at post-game interview confirmed that. It was basicly a match up -zone where defenders guard the player in their area and the defense always takes the alignment of the offense. It's pretty much a given that you have to match up your zone in the NBA because of court size and players' shooting ability.

I think it was a good showing, Rockets did a decent job in locating the shooters at the arc and forcing players like Marion and Ukic to shoot treys. With zone defense you'll always give up a three eventually, best you can do is "choose" the shooter and contest.

High post is a soft spot for the 2-3, ideally you'd like your guards to cover it but sometimes center has to come up and shade the man in the high post. Raptors got some shots from the FT-line but they were mostly turnaround jumpers, and most importantly they weren't able to make good passes out of that spot.

I liked how Yao was moving to cover the low post player, every time Raptors moved the ball to the low post he was in position to defend 1-on-1. I saw one pretty bad lapse, the Marion alley-oop along the baseline. Raptors were running pretty elementary set to counter the zone IMO and relied on good shooting. A true test would become against smarter and better coached teams.

Zone defenses are vulnerable to offensive rebounding, so all 5 players usually crash the defensive boards. That means fewer opportunities to get out on to the fast break.

I think the zone has potential in situations where teams are attacking Yao with an outside shooting big playing center like Bargani, Okur, Alridge or Nowitzki, or the pick & roll -defense is lacking. Usually teams can't stay in a zone for too long, every zone breaks eventually, but IMO they can be very effective in 3-5 minute spurts. Rockets have smart defenders to put on the floor, I could see it working. Though I don't know how Coach Adelman truly feels about zones, they haven't been that popular in the NBA and Adelman has been around the NBA for a while now.

I wouldn't mind seeing a short stretch of zone against Utah tonight.

Well zones were just made legal a few years back I believe. Teams are starting to use it more and more. But last night was a great adjustment by Adelman. Most of us know the pros and cons of a zone but basketball is a rhythm game and using it in spurts, where zone is most effective, can get teams out of rhythm. That is one thing I didn't like about JVG is that he never believed in zone, at all. Yao was getting murdered by Boozer during the series a few years back with Utah but JVG did not want to try to do zone, which was shown to be effective vs Utah during the regular season (again, in spurts) because it would force Utah to do something other than Boozer/DWill pick-and-roll.

Obviously you can't stay in a zone the whole game vs Utah because they are a great offensive rebounding team, but JVG basically let Boozer stay in rhythm the whole game and drop 40 a night. I thought that was unacceptable. Realize that even Pat Riley, JVG's mentor, used zone defense in spurts in the championship series vs DAL that they won a couple years back.

Adelman isn't perfect, his lineups make no sense at times, but he's shown he's not afraid to mix it up be it zone defense or going ultra small (2 PGs) or letting players who are hot finish games.

JVG played the paint zone
everyone guard the paint and let them shoot 3

MaxRider wrote:JVG played the paint zone
everyone guard the paint and let them shoot 3

and hope the other team don't get hot.