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[QUOTE="Fly Rodder, post: 5386406, member: 2133"]
I think there were a lot of variables that went into the decline of JAB's zone. He clearly got to tinkering with different rotations and slides and it changed over the last couple of decades. He needed specific types of players to make it work and when he did, it was a thing of beauty.

However, talent and size started to diverge in our recruits and as Kirbivore posted, the square peg round hole era. Remember Jonny Flynn and Paul Harris played a pretty good zone with a couple of shorter/wider bigs.

Then it started morphing into these beanpole centers with zero offensive capability covering the corner three and undersized SFs as guards at the same time as teams began to deploy more shooters and more capable shooters and focus on threes more. He started compromising to get the right physical attributes rather than the best players in response to more threes being shot.  Then the family ball started and defense really went to crap. We were a top-30 KP defense as recently as 18-19, by 19-20 we were 116th, 77th in 20-21, 207th in 21-22, and 185th in 22-23.

TL;DR I don't think it takes a big shift in 3PT% to challenge the zone's math and JAB did what he could to counteract it with size and tweaks, but he couldn't get the right players to make his ideas work as well as he thought they would.
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