Boeheim's rationale, as I understand it, is that with limited practice time, he has chosen to concentrate on the single defense. You may not agree or you may point to lack of coaching ability to fit instruction in more than one defense into allocated practice time, but the rationale is sound. It stands to reason that concentrating all available time on a single defense would allow it to be better than splitting the time between two or more defenses. It certainly maximizes the potential of that one defense. Possibly that trade off is not worth it when you factor in actual game situations where a change in defense could disrupt the other team, but these are debatable points. I reject the idea that it is a lazy or wrongheaded approach to focus on the one defense. We've observed that some squads pick it up and commit to it more than others and it is that factor that is primary, not the scheme.
I will add, that this year JB did see it coming. He knew this team was going to struggle to pick up the zone and that is why we saw some M2M in the preconference season. He saw that they weren't great at that either and went back to marshaling all resources towards getting the zone better. Again - we could debate that, was it his fault they couldn't do well enough in either defense, I don't know. But he had to make a decision and he made it.
