Zones v. Hand-check

[tha_rock220]

^scoring has gone down... The fact is they rarely call hand checks today. And zone defense is played more to prevent penetratin and force 3 point shots.

Survey says you lose. Zones today are most effective at doubling away from the ball so you deny offensive guy who can hurt you the ball. Only doing this to guards is a lot harder and requires almost monk like discipline. Double someone off the ball at the 3 point line and you're defense is being stretched thin. Double a big man before he gets ball the double comes usually doesn't have to come as far.

Didn't they take out the hand check rule a while ago? Before Lebron was in the league?

LeBron is a special case because handchecking would have been useless on him anyway. LeBron would have trucked over any great perimeter defener from Cooper to Pippen. He already does it to Artest and Pippen on a regular basis.

[aaqubed]

It depends on what kind of team you have. In general, though, I think you can beat a zone much easier than you can beat physical hand-checking defense. Zones can be beaten with good shooters and lots of ball and player movement. The defense can't keep up with constantly swinging the ball over, especially if there's good player movement, as well, forcing the defense to collapse.

But hand-checking can really slow down the quicker guards. If your offense is predicated on penetration, it really makes things much more difficult. But, of course, it doesn't really affect big guys as much, so if you have a dominant big man on your team then it changes the question entirely.

[pillwenney]

Like others have said, it depends on the player. I do think it's interesting to look back at the 90's and think about how there weren't many great wings. Like if you think about it....

Drexler, Dumars and Wilkens - Leaving their primes, but still fine players for a little while.
Jordan - It's Michael freakin' Jordan--he'll succeed against anything short of a "Break Jordan's Leg Rule".
Rice, Miller, Steve Smith, Hornacek, Chapman, Mullin - All guys that were mostly shooters (by my recollection anyway), and thus were not as affected by any rule having to do with them creating for others consistently.
Payton, Penny, Jim Jackson, Mitch Richmond, Kidd, Mashburn - All guys who were, in some way or another big for their position, and therefore less affected than others.

Other than those, the only acceptions that really came to mind were

Stockton
KJ
Starks
Pippen
Sprewell

[og15]

It depends on the team and what player we're talking about like others have said.

For perimeter players what zone can do is related more to how help defense works in that teams won't get called for illegal defense like before. Problem is that illegal defense was really a very vague rule that refs hardly knew how to properly enforce it, and it was let go so much that it was one of those calls that when it's made you say "well this has been happening all game, why call it now". And usually it was probably called because the opposing teams coaches and bench are screaming illegal defense to the ref lol. Teams helped "illegally" all the time before the rule was "officially" taken out. When a player had the ball you would still see guys on the defending team spying away from their man or creeping towards the side of the offensive player...and of course you could double team on the ball like you can now.

The zones now or really not so much zoning, but being able to double off the ball affects the big men. It makes it harder for them to get the ball at times, and really makes the game have more guard play than it previously would for the most part. For perimeter players this hardly does anything because if you decide to double a guy off the ball when he is far away from the basket, you will usually make your team defense significantly worse.

Hand-checking affects perimeter players more, it really does nothing for big men, handchecking goes on in the post all day, no one really cares that much. For perimeter players it allows you to get to the basket easier most of the time, though it's obviously not always called, but you can't do it to the same degree as before, and it also allows players to get to the line more than they would before.