i tend to agree you can really run anything. i think we have our personal favorites, but i'm not convinced there are sort of clearly ascendant combos. my personal favorite over the long haul is motion/press, but i can't really provide a reason why that makes any more sense than other pairings. in some ways, it seems to make less sense. its absolutely amazing though, there's no combination in the game with a greater share of jaw-droppingly good championship runs.
the main thing is you are going to want to have a coherent strategy that fits the set. any set can work, but not any set works with any strategy. here's some thoughts on some stuff -
fb/zone - this is a little bit backwards on some level, however, it can definitely work well. you just have to play it a lot differently than X/zone. IMO the goal with zone normally is to run a short team, but with fb/zone, you are now a middle-of-the-road pace team, who can't run slowdown. with any fastbreak, your 2pt scoring turns more on ath/spd/bh than other sets, less on lp/per. with fastbreak/zone, i think you tend to recruit really hard for ath/spd, with a little less focus on the elite lp/per scorers you need to justify zone in other zone schemes, and you can't slack on depth. i use this example because its one of the least intuitive, but i've played it and it works quite well, if you play it the right way.
triangle - with triangle i value high lp and per based scorers more than other sets. but scoring pgs are also a problem. i really liked triangle down in d2 a decade ago, i was able to consistently fill my team with high end defensive, bh/pass oriented point guards. in d1 those occasionally exist but competition is crazy, and strictly superior pgs who are just as good in those areas, but with 90 per to boot, exist as well. in d2 i was able to trade off that per scoring at the 1 for something tangible. its been interesting looking back on my old triangle teams, lately. i used to love triangle, and i knew it was different than motion, which i also loved, but i couldn't articulate how or why. i played triangle recently on my only d1 team (just started playing motion this year), and i finally can put into words that which i only could put into actions, back in the day (despite my 10 year old old d2 triangle program being one of the all time greats, to this day... 6 months ago you could still find me posting things on the conf board like, 'i don't understand how i have no idea how to play triangle')
i used to say, i felt motion needed more balance, but that was so imprecise. the deal with triangle is mainly threefold, when compared to motion. first, your pg is going to score less efficiently than any scheme, especially at higher distro. i prefer a 5ppg triangle pg, but d1 does not lend itself to this. i now consider triangle to be really a d2-d3 only scheme for the highest level of play, mostly because of that. second, triangle is harder to get away with ath/spd/bh type scorers, but it utilizes elite per especially and lp somewhat, more than other sets, so it ends up being the case that you need to concentrate scoring in the hands of your best scorers more. this, i think, is a big part of why i felt i ran motion on a more balanced basis.
third, and this is a big reversal on my part compared to posts i made in the past 10 years, but perhaps not with my posts a dozen years ago... triangle does have a special built in relation to 3 scorers. 3 scorers are selected for each play, and only those 3 scorers can score in the main part of that half court possession. wide distro variations across the 3 seem to make matters worse, and 0 distro players will be selected among the 3 when 3 non-zero distro players are unavailable. i don't think 0 distro players in triangle are a problem - in fact, i almost feel like you have to have them. the problem is that you really want to stack these at the same position, to eliminate the possibility of those 0 distro players coming on the court together and a 0 distro guy getting thrown into the triangle. and i think in today's d1, that makes life too much harder than it needs to be, to justify the advantages of triangle. it was a lot easier in d2 for my backup line to be a mirror of my starting line, which seems to me to be peak triangle.
alright, that said - i would generally avoid triangle in d1, and i wouldn't recommend it for newer coaches. its too different from the other sets. i know i have loosely agreed that the sets, outside fb, are the same-ish. but i also was sort of... beaten into compliance with that worldview, to some extent. and i do still hold it - to an extent. but a dozen years ago when i was learning the game, and was at the peak of my coaching efforts and abilities, i vehemently disagreed. the forums were a lot less tolerant towards dissenting view points back then, than they are now. plus, i couldn't articulate what i did in triangle and motion to be so successful with them, i only could coach them. its a hard thing... to articulate why you are doing what you are doing, with stuff like this. but i did learn a lot since then, i suppose - more, my breadth of knowledge has expanded a lot, since the early days. i'm still no better of a coach than i was then, and probably worse, when it comes to making the most of the teams i care about most. but i do have a lot more context. and that context says, sure, the offenses are 'pretty much the same', at a macro level, but that if you want to compete at the highest level of this game, you'll need a more accurate, more nuanced view than that - even if you can't explain what you are doing differently!
anyway, there's really no set combination i frown on. they all work. the offenses and defenses are all fairly different though, and its important to have an overall strategy for your team that makes sense with the sets you pick. you don't want to focus on depth and run zone, you don't want to tolerate lower speed while also running press, etc, do that while running man with probably motion or triangle... there's a lot of ways to win but you do want to try to avoid clear conflicts between your overall approach and the sets you pick.
4/14/2022 11:45 AM (edited)