Posted by bbunch on 5/1/2014 12:52:00 PM (view original):
Posted by gillispie1 on 5/1/2014 12:04:00 PM (view original):
i ask the same question with a zone team i coach with a guy in d1. zone is the only off or def i haven't won with, so im not the best source, but it seems pretty decent to me when the talent disparity between your players is large. i think its disadvantaged in championship play across the board, especially in d1, because the depth of talent on top teams tends to be very substantial, where getting more minutes to a starter over the backup just isn't that useful. zone isn't as common as other sets, and i think it is a good set, very possibly the best set, for a number of rebuilding situations - but you still hardly ever see zone teams win titles it seems.
anyway looking at your team, you have some good players but zone definitely suggests, to me, teams should be doing everything in their power to get super stars. studs go further on zone teams than in other defenses, taking walkons as necessary to accomplish this is worthwhile. i think you could do a bit more on that front. overall the talent gap wasn't as big as the seeding suggests, which happens all the time, so thats probably part of it, too (that and a little bad luck). that said, the one thing that really sticks out is rebounding. your rebounding is really bad for a d2 team, it seems to me, and you are getting killed on the boards over it (if you look at your team overall, and are seeing that +1 reb in your favor on team stats with that #2 sos, and not understanding why i still say you are getting killed on the board, let me know, and ill elaborate). zone is weaker than man on the boards in the first place, with those rebounding rating, its trouble. losing to a press team who has huge advantages over you in TOs and rebounds is going to be VERY easy. your offense/defense quality just in terms of shooting on both sides can overcome some of that stuff but its so easy to not have a great off/def night, and lose games, when you have to substantially beat the other team on raw off shooting/opponent shooting def just to break even.
I see the rebounding now, gillipsie. At first I thought...."What is he talking about?" being that we outrebounded Bakersfield by 4.......but they had 13 more missed shots, so we should have had a lot more rebounds.
Very helpful post. So do you think a solid zone team is often one that's pretty top-heavy with superstars, and might only go 9 or 10 deep? I agree that I probably focus to heavy on FG% offense and defense while missing some other factors. This game was a prime example where we significantly out-shot them, and still lost.
well, he also had you beat on offensive rebounds pretty bad. when i really want to compare rebounds, the best way, IMO, is to compare the % of rebounds each team got defensively on their end of the court. using your game as an example, on defense, you got 24 rebounds, and they got 14 offensive rebounds, so your defense got 63%, their offense got 37%. on the other end, their defense got 15, while your offense got 9. so their defense got 63% while your offense got 37%. so, thats a wash - but their rebounding is *awful*. playing a team like that, you need to be beating them badly on the boards, or its really a loss - when an underseeded team can tie you on rebounds, its just going to increase the odds of upsets from other areas.
what i was really talking about was your team line. the year stats for you are 299 off and 1034 total boards, for them (your opponents), 388 and 998. So your defense got 735 boards, while their offense got 388 - that gives your def a % of 64.6%. your offense got 299 boards, while their defense got 610, so their defense got 67.1% of the boards. this may not sound huge and really im surprised its so low, but its definitely significant. when you are a 1 seed trying to compete for a title, thats a higher level of play than a #2 sos, generally speaking, but usually its a significantly higher level you are trying to achieve than breaking even. really as a prospective champion, you should have a good looking stat line against your opponents - i mean, you are almost undefeated, after all! 29-1 going into the NT is fantastic especially on that SOS. i think if you gave up a bit of talent elsewhere for some reb, it would be to your benefit. so anyway, if you were breaking even, that STILL could be a weakness - so being behind by that much, from a champions point of view, thats getting killed. if the average team you played with that great sos was say, 50th, that means the 50th team is still significantly better than you (on average), from a rebounding standpoint. you don't need to be top 5 in everything but being borderline top 10 or at least like top 20-25 quality on something as important as rebounds, thats pretty important to position yourself as a 1 seed that is well protected from volatility and well positioned for a deep run!
on the 9-10 man rotation thing, you should definitely be exploiting 3 man rotations and guard and big when there is a decent talent gap between your 3rd and 4th man. this means in general, you could have as few as 7 players (everyone except the backup sf, the least important position player you got, in general) carrying almost the entire load, without even starting to get in fatigue trouble - 8 if you could the backup sf who could easily play as little as 10mpg in close games (don't look at overall mpg, especially if you check those boxes on team game plan - pull up the players game log and look at the close games and quickly mentally average those - that is a MUCH better indication of your "true" rotation - nobody gives a crap who plays how much when you are beating down someone by 20 points, and neither should you :) so you can definitely take it further than 9-10. we have 3 walkons on our d1 team with 3 freshman and are 26-1, 9th on the projection report, without a championship contender level of talent on the team. being not very experienced with those walkons, the reason it doesn't hurt us much, is in close games, our starters are playing high 20s, low 30s minutes. so those freshman and walkons don't really get the opportunity to hold us back too much, but we only have a b+ and a few of our stars are beastly, 2 guys are scoring about 20ppg at high efficiency, which leaves a much lighter load for "the rest of the team" than you usually have after your top 2 guys. by focusing on studs first and depth second, we take advantage of the key advantage of zone - which is simply that you get to play your best guys more and your bad guys less, than anyone else.
5/1/2014 2:53 PM (edited)