I inhertied a team that runs as Half Court Press/2-3 Zone. I'm now in my 3rd season ever playing this. While I managed to dominate the recruting approach from day 1, I'm still trying to get a feel for the game engine. I learned that it was much better to focus on one defense and especially either M2M or Zone than a split of FCP & Zone, so I went on to just allocating minutes into zone, tiny bit of 2 minutes on FCP because in the end sometimes its best to go FCP if you slightly behind.

But since I already got the IQ on both Zone & FCP, I figured I can go one or the other. What I am trying to figure out, is when its a good time to go FCP on the other team. Obviously Ballhandling has to do something with it, but when it comes to ball handling you can make these 2 arguments, if their ball handling is low then you can exploit their weakness and go full court press on them. But if their ball handling is high, then it would be hard for them to turnover so FCP can help to take care of that strength by the opposition team. The argument on low ball handling seems to make more sense but I'm not sure if that's the case.

I assume other factors like stamina, athleticism, passing have something to do with if you should go FCP. In addition it also probably has to do with if I should focus on running zone on the opposite team rather than neutral going both way.

So I ask you if you were in my situation, when will you go just zone, zone/half court press, or full court press.

go fcp, drop the zone. fcp is better than zone from my personal experience. 

If the opponent has 1 primary scorer, the FCP can do nothing to prevent him from going off.  In those instances, a zone and a double team would be advantageous.  If you already have the FCP IQ, I see no reason why you would ever go straight zone.  Either FCP (for slow teams, teams with weak stamina, or poor ballhandling teams) or FCP/Zone for teams with 1 or 2 players that get a very high % of the shots.

Posted by udm_mike on 8/3/2011 11:28:00 AM (view original):
If the opponent has 1 primary scorer, the FCP can do nothing to prevent him from going off.  In those instances, a zone and a double team would be advantageous.  If you already have the FCP IQ, I see no reason why you would ever go straight zone.  Either FCP (for slow teams, teams with weak stamina, or poor ballhandling teams) or FCP/Zone for teams with 1 or 2 players that get a very high % of the shots.

+1

Agree, udm_Mike good post