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[QUOTE="General20, post: 2316124, member: 724"]
This is a silly discussion. Two years ago Syracuse reached a final four with sub par interior defense and sub par interior scoring.  They went to the final four because they were the best in the country at stopping the three, and got hot making threes.

Last year they stunk defensively.  White was terrible defensively before coming to Syracuse, ditto Gillon, so can't blame the zone for that.

The only argument you can make for the zone being obsolete is that basketball changed so much between 2016 and 2017 that the zone went from being the best defense in the country to unplayable in one year.  This is, of course, an irrational  argument.  Trends change in basketball, but not that quickly.

There are downsides to playing zone, but I've noticed that nobody ever seems to make them when they try to criticize the zone. Almost all the criticisms of the zone I hear are irrational.

The two legitimate downsides I see are:

#1 Its harder to hide a bad defender in the zone.  
 #2 the players who are most effective in the zone are the long athletic types that tend to get drafted early by the NBA.

There are many upsides to playing zone of course.  A defense has two jobs.  One, create a turnover - we tend to be above average in turnovers and blocks.  Two, if you can't create a turnover, then force a bad shot.  We are consistently the best at this I've seen.   You know how people always complain that some nobody is scoring a lot of points against us?  That's actually the best compliment you can give a defense.  Offenses want their best players to get the shots they are most comfortable with.  We almost never give that to teams, and we force them to go to options B and C.  And while anybody can get hot in any given game, long term we have much better odds of winning, which of course, Boeheim's record is indication of how well this works.
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