I have been watching a lot of zone offense this year at the college level. This bothers me partly just because it means more and more teams are playing zone as their base defense. Not judging the coaches, you do what you have to do to win because your job is on the line.

But I feel like most of the zone offense looks the same. A lot of throwing the ball around the perimeter. A lot of a single high post that is trying to get position.

But I do not see a lot of off ball cutting, or passing and cutting through the zone.

It was during the Ohio State - VCU game that they credited a switch to zone defense with stagnating the other teams offensive flow. They pointed out how the offense just went to standing around on the perimeter.

Is there too much of an emphasis on "drift" movement in zone offenses and not enough emphasis on cutting through the zone. I'm not saying that the cuts get open, they often do not. But they do make the defense condense down and react to the cuts and that would leave other movements open. It also would make the offense less static. But it feels like so much in the way of zone offense now is static.

Thoughts?

I totally agree. It is boring watching these college teams stand around. Although I do like to see smart players pin the zone defenders and disrupt their slides in a high low type of game. Duke just did a pretty good job with that yesterday. Now granted their bigs were 2 feet taller and could do what they wanted.

We ran a 4 out 1 in motion offense this year that for the most part was based on the passer either screening away or basket cutting. We ran the same offense (with minor adjustments) against all zones and it worked great. The two adjustments we made were...

1. We almost always cut after making a pass (instead of screening away).
2. Use the "Hook and Look" when passing and cutting. Cutter finds the open spot in the zone, hooks in there, and looks for the ball.

The biggest thing we had to emphasize was....Make sure you quickly fill spots to the ball on the perimeter and create good angles to allow for good ball movement.

For some reason when teams went to zone our players stopped filling spots the way the were supposed to. So we had to emphasize that to make it work effectively.

The basket cuts allows us to get lots of ball movement and player movement. We ran the same offense for every game and it worked great.