The slow death of zone defenses
Zone usage has dropped almost 60% in the last decade. Why?
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I am old enough to have been on Twitter, née X The Everything App Including The Bad Stuff, for 15 years now. That’s quite a dark sentence, one that should probably come with jail time and/or rehab. But! I can remember a lot of things that have happened in that time, a few of them even worth remembering. One consistent thing I can recall for 15 years straight is that many believe a Zone Defense Is For Cowards. Just ask Bomani Jones, who tweeted this on April 1, 2024:
And on March 28, 2011.
Jones expresses a pretty divisive opinion here, but the zone defense itself is a fairly divisive concept. Teams that run good zone defenses force long, slow defensive possessions that meander. Most zone defenses aren’t very fun to watch, in part because most zone offenses aren’t, either. It can remind one of a bad youth basketball game if you watch long enough.
Syracuse has made approximately 37 Sweet Sixteens in my 31 years because for a while, their 2-3 zone was so tight and annoying that it was like a culture shock for anyone who played it. This is perhaps less surprising when you note the number of teams running a zone defense the majority of the time in Synergy’s now 14-season database. (They have more partial seasons, but 2011-12 is the first full one.)
There’s been a similar dropoff in women’s basketball as well. In 2014-15, ten seasons ago, an astonishing 43 teams ran a zone defense on at least 50% of their defensive possessions. In 2024-25, this number is 11, with teams like Seattle (50.9%) and West Virginia (51.7%) barely hanging on above the cutline.
I have a few theories for this, but some were blown up pretty quickly. One was that COVID caused a full re-evaluation of priorities and how things were done, but this goes hand-in-hand with the transfer portal, which also caused a full re-evaluation of priorities and how things were done. Given the gigantic dropoff in year-over-year minutes continuity since 2022, per KenPom, this does track to some extent.
But in theory, the 2-3 zone - and some of the other zone concepts, particularly any involving a press - aren’t that difficult to teach. Every youth basketball team I played on growing up utilized some form of it. It’s been in existence for 110 years. Of course, this is because most basketball teams I played on growing up sucked, and a 2-3 zone (any zone) is generally seen as your best way to not get blown out. If a team is far more talented than you and you play man-to-man, the game likely goes according to script. Throw a zone in and you induce some amount of variance, at least in theory.
Investigating this from a stats perspective, though, I began to notice some fairly obvious things. For one, zone defenses force significantly more jumpers than normal man-to-man offenses…but don’t meaningfully reduce the number of attempts at the rim, either. In general, the average zone defense gives up a better shot on the average possession than an average man defense does to the tune of 2-3 points per game.
Does any zone defeat this? Is there anyone pushing back against the tide? Well, yes. But only one is still holding the banner at the level we grew to expect in the 2010s.
BEHIND THE WALL ($): An attempt to explain why you get all these jumpers against a zone defense