Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="Dave85, post: 1264929, member: 3946"] Whenever I watch other teams play man on defense it just doesn't look right. My mind thinks, "what are they doing." This is my favorite JB quote on the subject of this thread: [B]"When a man-to-man coach is getting beat, he tells his team to play defense better, he doesn't switch to a zone,'' Boeheim said. "When we get beat in our zone for whatever reason it is, we try to change it or play it better.''[/B] After watching Orange basketball for 34 years I've stopped even having the thought about playing man-to-man. It's like asking a devout Christian to stop believing in God. If you want to see man-to-man defense then rooting for the Orange may not be your thing. Here's JB's motivation for just playing 2-3 zone: [B]"The short history of our zone is we started out as a man-to-man team with some zone and over the years our zone got better, but we still played man,'' Boeheim said. "The problem when you play man, you have to spend an hour on your man defense every day and when you play your preseason games, your non-conference games, if you're playing man your zone isn't getting better.'' Boeheim said he realized that if the Orange was going to play zone, it had to do it all the time. "So finally it dawned on me,'' said Boeheim, "after about 27 or 28 years, finally, takes me a while, that if we played zone all the time and didn't waste time playing man to man and put some wrinkles in the zone because we had more time to practice it, that our defense would be better.'' There was a side benefit to putting 100 percent effort into the zone. "You don't have that decision that people are always saying to me, well, why don't you switch to your man-to-man,'' Boeheim said. "Well, you can't switch to something you don't have. They stopped asking that question.'' [url]http://www.syracuse.com/orangebasketball/index.ssf/2013/03/syracuse_coach_jim_boeheim_say.html[/url][/B] [/QUOTE]

Verification: What is a Syracuse fan's favorite color?