UCLA zones....in?
You should have seen the looks on my colleagues' faces with around 15 minutes to play last night in UCLA's overtime loss to Cal.
There were looks of pure amazement, a little confusion, even a little smugness.
Finally, surprisingly, shockingly, UCLA switched into a zone defense. It's been a long time coming.
Despite constant questioning from the media about even testing a zone defense, UCLA head coach Ben Howland had been so steadfast in his opinion that, quite frankly, I never expected it.
Coach, will you use the zone?
"No."
Would you consider it?
"No."
Why not?
"We play man-to-man."
Do you ever practice it?
"Only when the other team uses it."
So when it happened, suffice to say, we were all blown away. So too, it appears, were the players.
"It caught me by surprise, to tell you the truth," Joshua Smith said. "I remember going in the huddle and he said we were going to run zone and I was kind of like "Oh, OK."
The response among the players was universally positive, and though Howland said he would not use the defense for the rest of the season, you have to think he'll reconsider.
"It was good. It slowed them down. They had a good game plan and the zone kind of threw them off a little bit. That's really the first time we did it all season. Coach made a good adjustment and maybe if another team is hitting all their shots on us, we'll see it again." - Reeves Nelson
"I felt like we should've played zone against a couple teams. We're long enough and athletic enough to do that. Showing teams different looks is going to confuse them." - Tyler Honeycutt
"The zone stopped the bleeding a lot. Although they were scoring in the zone, it was more like one out of three times, as opposed to scoring every time against the man. Zone is the reason we got back in the game." - Malcolm Lee
At this point, we all know Howland is who Howland is. But maybe he's learned that with this team's deficiencies, he'll need to bend a bit.
That was weird. Around that time it sure looked like they switched to a zone, but I thought, no, didn't Howland imply that he was done with it? Sure enough, a couple minutes later, the announcers said they were playing a zone.
Just my opinion but not only would I like to see us use a zone more often to mix it up (if even for only a few possessions per game), I would like to see us apply full court and half court presses occasionally to get the opposition out of rhythm and maybe get some easy turnover baskets. These are all just tools to use as appropriate according to the game situation. I think man-to-man is still the best defense but keeping the opposition off balance is in my opinion always a great strategy. Plus there are times when we may need to press late in games to give ourselves a chance to get back in the game, but it's not easy to do unless we have had experience with it.
Does anyone remember the Georgetown teams of the 1980s? They played some pretty good zone defense.
Man on man D works great until you play a more experienced and athletic team. We've seen UCLA's man D get beat every year Ben brought us to a final four(specially against Florida). It's crazy to not have it in the arsenal.
Of course Howland would say he'd never play zone - why would he say anything else? The surprise factor makes it that much more effective.
Actually when we went to Zone, Cal attacked and was successful a number of times. It helped stop Gutierez from driving a little, but it still was not that effective imo because its so susceptible to offensive boards. You know it had to kill Howland when Cal kept getting offensive boards with the zone.
Agree LifeLong Bruin, nice to see CBH mix it up a bit. Good to see him being flexible and willing to try new wrinkles and instead of his past when stubborn when it came to zone. Don't think we should rely on, but just to throw a new look to opposing teams.
Your team should be coached to be able to make any in-game chages necesarry not my way or the highway this is big boy bball were gonna run into teams that we can't play whatever way we want against we are nowhere near that talented you really need to understand that Howland