The common saying on NBA Twitter is that zone defense is for cowards, because people think it’s a cheap college and high school tactic, but Sunday night it won the game for the short-handed Sixers, who got their first W of the season without Joel Embiid. They were previously 0-4 without the big man in the lineup.
The Sixers were losing by double digits as the fourth quarter began, and looked atrocious in all facets of the game, but they went on a ridiculous run to ultimately outscore the Pacers 37-15 in the final 12 minutes and win by nine. They’re now 15-6 on the season and remain atop the Eastern Conference.
This would have been a really stinky loss, but instead we’ve got a fantastic win to talk about, and the turnaround was spurred by Doc Rivers, who put his team in a 2-3 zone with the long and lean Ben Simmons at Matisse Thybulle at the top of the defense. It was a look that totally flustered Indiana, and when we say “flustered,” that’s being kind. Indy had no clue what the hell they were doing. It looked like they’d never seen a zone before. You’d think these guys were English majors who got dropped into advanced accounting and were just trying to skate by with a 60%, because “D’s earn degrees,” as we were told at age 19.
“It just takes them out of rhythm,” said Rivers of the defensive switch. “We were doing what we call our John Chaney matchup zone. Especially in the NBA, because of the short shot clock, when you get a couple of stops, it starts becoming more mental to the other team. If they score, then you have to get out of it. But I just wanted to knock them off rhythm. I thought they had such great rhythm against us for those three quarters. Running (zone) there at the end was fantastic.”
It really was, and you saw the effectiveness on plays like these:
Malcolm Brogdon runner? T.J. McConnell tight angle layup? Both shots with a hand in their face? You’d settle for that any day of the week, and because Indy was missing shots left and right, the Sixers just stayed in the 2-3 and didn’t come out of it.
“Whenever I use zone I run it until I think they’ve solved it,” Rivers added. “What it did was stop their movement. Their movement was killing us. They were attacking the paint and beating us off the dribble, then all of a sudden we went zone and packed it in. It helped. They missed a couple of shots. And when you miss a couple of threes early in a zone, in the NBA, it becomes tough, all of a sudden.”
Not only did it help cut down movement, but the Pacers aren’t a heavy three-point shooting team to begin with with. They only take 34 threes per game and only hit at 35.7%, both numbers placing them in the bottom half of the league.
One of the things Indy eventually tried to do was attack via a side ball screen on one of the defenders at the top of the zone, which you saw in the second play in that video clip.
When you freeze it, it looks like this:
Normally teams will actually ball screen from the other side, the defender’s inside, because the idea is that you’re trying to force the second top defender to collapse. That’s what opens up the perimeter and allows you to swing the ball. In this case, T.J. gets to the paint, but Korkmaz stays put in his corner, and Howard comes out to meet McConnell instead. It’s almost like pick and roll drop coverage in typical man-to-man defense.
“At the end of shootaround we’ll go over it for literally five minutes,” Rivers said of his team practicing the zone. “Basically all we’re working on is the bumping, like in the matchup zone you just sort of bump guys and I tell you, the talking did help. It helped a ton, first that the defense was in front of our bench, so the guys could hear the coaches and everyone talking. And there was no crowd, so we could hear each other talking. Zone takes a lot communication and I thought our guys did a great job.”
Rich Hofmann at The Athletic likes to say that the Sixers are “popping the Kork” when Furkan enters the game, and holy cow did this man have himself a fourth quarter.
He did this:
He hit at least one of those shots with a bum hand, which made the run even more enjoyable.
But great Furk game. He hit season highs in points (17) and field goal attempts (12), and was the offensive catalyst that sparked the big run.