Showtime 80 wrote:lessthanjake wrote:ScrantonBulls wrote:Zone was illegal for the 80s and 90s mostly. I've heard people claim they got rid of the ban because Shaq was too dominant. You couldn't double team him when he didn't have the ball. That made things more difficult.
Is it time to bring the ban back? The year it was banned were the most fond eras in many people's opinions. No more zones to help stifle the best player. There would definitely be more isoball. We'd see the best players go 1v1 more often, because teams would not want to commit to the double as often.
What would the implications be if they banned zone again? Would we see an explosion in scoring?
If you brought back the illegal defense rule, it would indeed become easier to score in isolation, because teams wouldn’t really be able to have defenders shade towards the guy with the ball. That would make it easier to score in isolation and/or get to the hoop, while leading to less playmaking. Scoring would presumably go up overall (after all, obviously defenses shade defenders towards the guy with the ball because they think that will lower the offense’s scoring on average). Scoring would probably go up significantly.
But that’s assuming we changed this rule while keeping all the rest of today’s context the same. Which is a crucial point, since your purpose in this thread is obviously to act like it was easier to score in Jordan’s era. A lot more than illegal defense rules have changed since then, both in terms of the rules themselves and how they are enforced. For instance, traveling rules have been relaxed even more, with the gather step thing basically allowing an extra step. Palming is basically a completely defunct rule, whereas it actually was occasionally called back then. Hand-checking was allowed more back then—though this is not a totally black-and-white thing, since players still push the envelope on this. Offensive push offs are more tolerated now than they were back then. So, while illegal defense rules make scoring easier, the entire ruleset in the 1980s and 1990s did not make scoring easier overall. And that basically eviscerates the real point you’re trying to make here.
And, of course, that’s not even getting into the fact that teams put way more shooting on the court and that dramatically increases the space offensive players have. This makes offense way easier now. Crucially, this almost certainly more than mitigates the lack of illegal defense rules by itself. After all, the areas that defenders go these days to shade towards the guy with the ball are basically just areas that would be near other offensive players in the less-spaced-out 1980s and 1990s. In other words, in the 1980s and 1990s, you didn’t need to play zone in order to have defenders blocking the driving lanes. When you combine this with the other rules I listed above, we get a net result of offense being substantially easier now (which, of course, is borne out by scoring efficiency being higher).
Of course, if you kept all the space and other differences in rules and rule enforcement, then implementing illegal defense rules would basically make defense almost impossible now. Driving lanes couldn’t be blocked without a hard double, and that would get punished extremely easily. But that situation is a hypothetical with an overall ruleset that has never existed, and your attempt to use this hypothetical to suggest that scoring in the 1980s and 1990s was easier is transparently silly.
Excellent analysis!
Steve Nash is the poster child for this, a bench player/middle of the road player magically turns into an all star/two time MVP thanks to the “pseudo zone” coupled with the defensive 3 second rule and complete removal of hand checking.
lol, what is this BS?
Nash was helped by the zone, really? how so? and you know his breakout year was the last one with illegal defense?
