Flip Saunders opened his first Washington Wizards training camp by giving out iPod Touches to all of his players that contain his entire offensive playbook. Hopefully, they also contain snippets from the DVD that Saunders made when he was head coach in Detroit on how to play a match-up zone defense.
“I still say zones can be extremely effective,” said Saunders last week. “When players hear that four-letter word, ‘zone,’ they freak out half the time. You can even have not a good zone, and it works just because it’s a different look.”
The Wizards were the second-worst team in the NBA last season in opposing field goal percentage. But Saunders does have two key interior pieces that weren’t available last year, a healthy Brendan Haywood and newly-added Fabricio Oberto.
Both will help tend to two of the match-up zone’s key tenets: protecting the paint and providing help on the ball.
“I think Oberto helps us defensively because he’s a guy that you don’t have to tell him where to be,” said Haywood. “He already knows. That was a part of our problem last year. We had a lot of guys that didn’t really know where to be, and he’s not going to be part of that problem.”
Antawn Jamison put it better: “[Oberto] said from day one, ‘I set screens, and I smell blood.’ I said, ‘I’m going to like you.'”
Saunders has employed his signature defense — “a zone with man-to-man principles” — for years. Even before illegal defense rules were scrapped prior to the 2001-02 season, coaches eschewed zone concepts for their own teams but would struggle to solve them.
“The best thing is when the guys are on the floor and one guy says, ‘They’re in a zone.’ ‘No, they’re in a man,'” said Saunders. “They’re complaining with each other trying to figure out what you’re in.”
