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Message: [QUOTE="General20, post: 1949891, member: 724"] Glad you guys brought this up. I should have. We did run an unusual zone trap towards the end of the game. Sometimes Syracuse will bring both guards forward as soon as the ball crosses half court, for what you might call a mini press, or a really high up the court trap. We did this a lot in the 90's but haven't done it much since. This was like that, but different in two ways. First, it didn't occur quite so far away from the basket. This happened closer to the 3 point line than to half court. Second, instead of using two guards we used a guard and a forward. Specifically we used Thompson (and I forget the guard, I want to say it was Battle). This actually worked really well for three reasons: One, it was surprising. Before the LeMonye guard knew what was happening he had a 6'10 and 6'6 guy in his face. Two, Chukwu. They didn't want to go anywhere near him, so he could cover large amounts of the court by himself without us really sacrificing anything on D. Three, we used LeMoyne's lack of size against them. When you use a full court press against a team that has 5 guards you are playing into their hands buy giving them space to use their quickness against you. Simple math here, 5 defenders cover less of an entire court than they do a half court or a third of a court. Here our defense really only guarded the last third of the court, but we still managed to get the traps that you hope to get in a full court press. So we got the traps on their little guys that we wanted, without giving up the space that allowed them to use their quickness. I noticed after the game that Boeheim mentioned that SU's zone was not producing enough turnovers. Perhaps this was his answer to that? I'm not sure if its a weapon he wants to use during the regular season or if its just a teaching tool to help get the zone to the point where it can create turnovers without the need for such risky traps. I would think that for it to work in the regular season Chukwu will have to turn out to be as intimidating to high D1 players as he was to LeMoyne players. If that happens we're in great shape as a team whether we trap or not! [/QUOTE]

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