Strategies for Better Zone Offense | Matt Hackenberg

I'm guessing that there are at least some out there who they just kind of briefly heard the introduction and thought to themselves, "Beat a zone? I know how to beat a zone." You position guys in gaps, odd front if we're attacking an even defensive front, even front if we're attacking an odd front.

You move the ball around the perimeter in and out, then you take the first open look.

Is that the best strategy?

Uh, it could be.

A lot of coaches have used that strategy, uh, throughout the course of time, but that's one of the interesting things that came about in this study, and I've actually done two different studies on zone offense.

Uh, the most recent product that I released is called Hall of Fame Coaches Zone Offense, where I took a sampling of 10 kind of Hall of Fame caliber coaches.

I broke down 30 seasons' worth of their zone offense possessions, and I looked for the trends and the concepts that, you know, were across most of the different coaches.

So that was really interesting, but I also a few years ago released the Encyclopedia of Zone Offense, which is a much more expansive zone offense look where there's about 60 pages of detailed writing.

There's 250 pages of playbook.

There's these chalk talks.

There's these film reels.

But between those two different products, I found a lot of interesting angles to work with zone, and the one that you brought up first here is about movement within zone offense, particularly like a base zone offense.

And I think a lot of coaches kind of go through this evolution when they're understanding how to attack zone offense, and it starts with what you described as what I would call gaps.

We put somebody at the point.

We have two wings.

We have a high post and a low post, and we really work off of a spacing structure zone, whether it's to throw it to the high post and then look down to the baseline for the high-low, or if the zone shifts too far over when we hit the wing, we're looking to skip the ball.

So I think a lot of coaches start there, and then I think the natural progression from there is, uh, this is fine, but, uh, this is a little too static.

I want some movement in my zone offense.

So I think the kind of next natural progression a lot of coaches find is they would go to a concept that I call power, which is basically instead of having one player stay at the high post the whole time, they would have their two posts maybe start in like a one-two-two alignment, and then when the ball picks a side, we're flashing from the weak side to the high post.

And as the ball moves, if you can picture it, you know, these posts are kind of exchanging who is filling the middle.

And some coaches like that, but they might say, "Well, you know, that's good, but I don't want two of my posts handling the ball.

I, I want, I want movement in my zone offense, but I don't necessarily want both my posts as the featured person in the middle." And what they find from there is there's a concept that I would call triangle, which you've probably seen, where if you pass the ball to a wing, we're in this one-three-one alignment.

We would have the backside player on the wing flash into the middle.

The player in the middle is gonna move from the high post up to the top of the key, and the player at the top of the key is gonna flare to the backside.

So now we're getting some movement against the zone, but we're interchanging four different players into the middle, uh, and it's more focused around our guards.