I shall agree with Vinseks, lately I feel that playing LI / MoM is THE way to go. When you see PGs with 14-15-16 IS being bought for enormous amounts of money ... you can think it isn't about to change.
For a game that is tactically rich as basketball, it seems a bit worrying to see all the best teams playing all the same. I don't think it is about to evolve, but it could : perhaps turn the useless 2 - 3 defense into something usable, or lower the salary increase generated by inside defence.
That's all what this is about : a 19 OD is waaay cheaper than an 19 ID, thus everybody has a wonderful OD and a lower ID.
And yes !ngkor, there are too few belgian managers active on the forums, but what can we do ? :)
first off:
2-3 isn't useless. You just need the right players to play it. Just like you need Od to stop JS on bigs, you need OD to stop penetrating guard.
say you play 2-3. opposing guard dribbles your guard and penetrates. the C ( or PF or SF) then has to make a decision. Move towards the incomming guard to stop him, or stay where he is and give up an uncontested shot. If he does the later, then that usually means 2 easy points for the opponent. If he moves out towards the guard and the guard takes a jumpshot, you need OD to defend it. Say the guard wants to pass the ball to his teammate behind the C. You need OD to intercept (or pressure) the pass to force a turnover.
Now, most C's have OD lvl 5 (and i think i'm being a bitt optimistic with my llv 5 OD). a guard comming in with JS 12 vs OD 5 ==> no effect. Guard with PA 12 comming in and going for the pass against OD 5 ==> very little chance of intercepting that ball, let alone force a bad pass.
So, if you want to play 2-3 correctly, you need bigs with OD. Why do you think that most NT's are replacing all there C's by PF's. The PF's have a lower ammount of ID, RB and SB ( in most cases compared to a C). However, they got more OD. With the OD that those PF's got, you can actually use the 2-3 zone correctly Futhermore, having PF's with decent guardskills ( as you see them popping up all over BB nowadays) means that you can better play the Princeton attack.
So Motion and RaG might not be very good attacking options anymore with the new GE, but Princeton is very effective against 2-3 zone.
Whereas the focus used to be on Motion/RaG for outside and LP for inside, it now is Princeton for Outside and LI for inside. The idea behind the GE now is that a team full of SF's is better than a team full of primairy skill monsters.
That is why they introduced cross training, etc. Sadly it also reflects the NBA to a certain degree: Look at Durant, Lebron and Melo. At the Olympics, they played SF and PF spot. and they were untouchable.
Aslong as height isn't factured in when it comes to defense like it is in the NBA, then you'll keep have these players with wrong proportions.
I'm pretty sure that once people see the effects of a Bigman with JS 14 JR 13 playing in outside tactics, that they will start training those bigmen again and that you'll see that the other outside tactics become more popular again. But we got to face the facts: It's much easier to train Guards with a high amount of IS than to train Bigmen with a high amount of JS and JR without giving them somekind of OD. I'd love to try and play RaG with a PF with JR 13 (without that PF being a SF!) The problem is finding a person who's willing to train it.
so the 2-3 zone isn't useless. It's just that hardly anyone has the team to play it correctly.