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I won Utopia cup playing 3-2 and I dont have any of the problems you are talking about. And having SB in your inside players is not a problem for this zone.

I also wonder if SB+OD combination (my center is a bit better than starting PG - who is a PF - in outside defense, one skill point, with his OD probably being half of what the opponent's JS was on two positions)

My guess is that your OD is not very good, so the zone doesnt work as intended.

I agree. As others have said, I think that your OD has to be higher than the opp passing abilities. If it isn't than their passes will get into the paint and you are in trouble. When you think of all the players with high passing out there than your OD better be really high if you plan to win a lot with this defense against low focused teams.

I don't watch to that many lives nowdays and it's difficult to make a conclusion from 1 game. But having a look at your play-by-play, your center defended mainly the SG and your PG the center or SF. It's like you swap on defense some players or the zone chooses the best OD players and puts them in the PG-SG-SF. I know box and 1 works that way, but have no idea about the 3-2 because I always place 3 good OD players outside.
I'll make some experimenting in my Private League games to see if I can replicate what you are talking about.

If you had 5 starters with 14/15 OD I think you may just have success with the 3-2. Outside of the top levels this would be hard to experiment doing though. You would still need the two bigs to have ID or a LI or LP would still crush you inside regardless of how many steals you get from the zone. The times that I have used a zone, there always seem to be some weird plays and rotations. The only zone that I have used with any success was when I used a 2-3 against teams that only play LI or LP and have weaker perimeter scoring. Everyone knows that the zone defenses are flawed to an extent, and therefore use them in experiments or when they have a team strictly built for them. M2M even has some weird defensive matches without explanation. Sometimes the game says there is a rotation and other times there are rotations without any notice at all. All in all, the game can never be perfect, but I still love playing regardless..

Lemme put it this way, if I had a, say, 14 OD guy out there, could this still happen? This is what I'm interested in.

I think it would. And, yeah, I think you're being a little grumpy. I haven't played a 3-2 zone IRL in a very long time, but I think even IRL a corner trap would be one of the "3" and one of the "2", and a cross pass or some quick passes to the other perimeter would leave your other "2" scrambling and flying at the pass recipient on offense.

So I don't think placing a guy in the C or PF slot of a 3-2 zone means that they will never get stuck needing to defend an outside shot, either ingame or in IRL.

I personally think the 3-2 is a very good defense, I've seen it work against even Look Inside and/or Low Post back in D4, can't speak about the highest levels. I actually expected this thread to be about 3-2 being too good, not being too bad.

edit: KK MAJSTOR Bednja took, what? 118 shots? So if half of them were outside, @59, and your center defended 5 of them, that's still only 8% of outside shots he defended. Is that a lot? He played 47 out of a possible 53 minutes, right? It doesn't seem like a lot to me.

Last edited by Harold Miner at 3/20/2017 11:29:12 PM

The zones are unreliable at best. I've tried 3-2 and 2-3 and both place the wrong players in the wrong positions on the floor. There is no reason that an inside defender should be guarding outside shooters on multiple occasions. The only solution is to build each defender the same way, and use the little bump you get to ID or OD from the chosen tactics. The sim is just not advanced enough to recognize that a zone is designed so you don't have to switch assignments. Each player stays home.