Zoned Out - How Can Illini Defeat More Zone Defense Looks?
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- One of the reasons Iowa proved to be a difficult matchup for this Illinois team was its ability to throw out several defensive looks in Carver-Hawkeye Arena.
Iowa head coach Fran McCaffrey switched his team’s defensive look coming out of nearly every timeout and stoppage of time during the No. 17 Hawkeyes pulling out a 72-65 victory on Super Bowl Sunday.
Illinois gets 28 percent of its field goal attempts in transition and 43 percent of its shots near the rim but what happens when those easy transition opportunities simply aren’t there? What happens when the opposition gets back on defense and gets back in a different set than in the previous possession? The results aren’t pretty as evidenced by prolonged stretches at Iowa City showed.
Illinois (16-6, 8-3 in Big Ten) spent most of the first half trying to figure out the pressure points of Iowa’s matchup zone and in the words of Illini third-year head coach Brad Underwood “going east and west” instead of attacking off the dribble toward the basket. While Illinois ended the first 20 minutes in Iowa City up one, the Illini had no fast-break points, no dunks and were 13 of 24 on lay-up opportunities.
Instead of trying to find inside opportunities, the team ranked No. 20 in the latest Associated Press poll settled for 3-point shots. And sometimes, that’s just fine. Purdue executed a brilliant game plan Wednesday night of making 19 of 34 from beyond the 3-point arc on its way to 104 points on its way of a 36-point blowout win over Iowa inside Mackey Arena. The old rule of thumb against a zone defense is to shoot them out of it and the defense will eventually have to switch back to man-to-man principles as a deal for not giving up many more open perimeter shots. This is “make more shots” premise Illinois leading scorer Ayo Dosunmu wants to go with when the Illini see a zone defense Friday night (7 p.m., FS1) when they host No. 9 Maryland (18-4, 8-3) with outright first place in the league standings on the line.
“We just didn’t make shots and (Iowa) was able to stay in (the zone) but we get up shots every single day so I’m not really worried so much about a zone,” Dosunmu said. “You know how you take that zone out? You make shots. Get in the gym and start making shots. Get in the game and make shots.”
And therein lies the problem. Illinois is 13th in a 14-team Big Ten Conference in 3-point shooting in league games after making just 28.4 percent (54 of 190) of its attempts and last in the league in threes made per game at just under five per contest. The Illini, who only have two rotational players converting at least 37 percent of its 3-point attempts (Trent Frazier and Alan Griffin), hasn’t shown a consistency to simply shoot their way out of offensive stagnation and Underwood knows this very well.
“We want the ball in the interior as much as we can and that’s the one thing we missed early in the Iowa game,” Underwood said. “We’ve spent a good amount of time this week working on that. When we got the ball in the interior against Iowa, we were really good.”
Maryland, who uses primarily a four-game lineup around Jalen Smith, will show a lot of zone defense concepts in the hope of trying limit post touches for freshman center Kofi Cockburn and sophomore forward Giorgi Bezhanishvili.
After a film review of the loss at Iowa, the Illini’s first loss in a month, Underwood counted over a half-dozen inside touches for the Illini big men missed by perimeter guards. The following two charts provided by StatBroadcast details how Illinois didn’t find touches inside the paint nearly enough.
“You can’t go a whole possession without throwing the ball into the interior of the paint,” Underwood said. “We have to better at that no doubt (against Maryland). I have a lot of confidence that every time Giorgi catches the ball that something good is going to happen.”