Freshman boys team at one of the huge publixs
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Anonymous
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Very accurate, and there are a lot of teams in this area that do that too, and probably over perform their talent level a bit.[/b] Team Attack is a good example, Nova Cavs,[b]etc. And a lot of the time, you win games against those talented kids that play bad basketball. But when they beat you...Absolutely terrible feeling.
Predominantly White team. Hahaha |
Anonymous
The AAU demographic splits largely reflect the make up of the HS demographic splits in the area...Or so it seems. Team Attack and D1SA, largely white kids from Loudoun. Nova Cavs, Nova 94, Fairfax Stars, all pull from schools like Marshall, Madison, Oakton, etc...Family over Fame pulls from schools like Edison, Hayfield, Garfield. It all makes sense. |
Anonymous
| RE: overperforming their talent level - AAU basketball is full of clubs and coaches who run junk presses and zones to basically gimmick their way into wins. You can definitely steal some games, or at the very least make the score more respectable, by keeping the scoring down and mucking up the game. It helps B level parents and kids feel like they belong. Maybe that's the whole point of B and B+ level AAU anyways, just enjoy being part of the whole AAU scene for as long as you can. |
Anonymous
And this is a bad thing? This happens at literally every level of basketball. You play to win the game...You can try to make the argument that getting beat down by 80, and staying in man is good for development. It's not. |
Anonymous
DP. It is a bad thing. Euros are producing better basketball talent than us right now precisely because they focus much more on skill development. Eventually basketball is about man defense and half court offense. Pressing and zones prevent kids from skill development though they get to win. If you are consistently losing (or winning!) by 80 then you have signed up for the wrong division. The answer is to recalibrate which division you are signed up for. |
Anonymous
This is a huge oversimplification of why Europeans are producing SOME better basketball talent (we're still significantly better). The youth basketball model as a whole needs vast improvements, but it has little to nothing to do with youth players pressing and playing zone. Zone is crucial at all levels of basketball. You rarely see teams play zone exclusively anymore, but they are a HUGE part of development and understanding movement in basketball. And the game has changed significantly with teams at all levels playing faster and relying on early offense, you're actually seeing less half court offense than you did ten years ago. This is not to say that it's not crucially important to play good man defense, or run good concepts in the half court, but you're talking about the game as if it's 1995 and not 2025. Most tournaments in the area at the developmental level do not give you a chance to pick a division to sign up for, even though they say they do. Not enough teams. Sometimes you can do it at bigger tournaments (MADE, Hoop Group, etc), but look at the disparity in scores and you'll see it's virtually impossible to play even the majority of your teams games at the right skill level. Only the best teams are rightly placed. |
Anonymous
I disagree. The discussion point was using a gimmick defense such as a zone or a press to work your way into a win. At the youth level, defense is easier to teach/play, especially simply based on aggression. Offense takes more time to learn. By the time you get to college a press/zone is rare precisely because it a a flawed strategy. Early offense is a symptom of the problem: score before the defense is set because it is easier rather than lacing up and beating a defense in the half court. To be clear, I think this is smart basketball but it comes at the cost of skill development—skill development is precisely where the Euros are ahead of us. There is a reason why James Harden in 2017-18 is the last NBA MVP to fully come up through the American youth basketball system. A trend that will almost certainly continue into the medium term future. The problem with pressing and zones is that they come at the expense of reps for BOTH teams in trying to problem solve. It substitutes space elimination/aggression for tactics and skill, in order to get the win. Basketball is a beautiful sport that wonderfully blends individual performance within the construct of the team structure. Zones and presses take that away until an ENTIRE team is ready to handle it. Once the entire team is ready to handle a zone/press, then the concepts become almost unusable. I think that is the crux of the issue. A zone/press at the youth level, for the vast majority of players, comes at the expense of skill development. The same thing happens in youth baseball. Stupid strategies are deployed to try to gimmick your way to victory rather than playing the game as it will eventually be played when everybody has developed the skills to play the game efficiently. If your team cannot find tournaments where it consistently finds itself in competitive games then it shouldn’t be signing up for [those] tournaments. Can you really say with a straight face that either team really learns anything from a 60-point game? As it stands, the winning team wasn’t challenged and the losing team didn’t learn anything, either. But that press sure did produce a lot of layups and that zone sure did stop drives to the basket. If you banned pressing/zone until high school, then the better team still wins but it will be forced to play man defense and the losing team at least gets into half court offense and can explore space and learn from it. Both teams would be better served developmentally from such rule changes. In reality, tournaments are a huge part of the problem with American youth basketball. Parents are spending a ton of money on those tournaments, which in turn puts pressure on coaches to win rather than do the correct thing developmentally. Eventually these kids get to high school and they are poorly prepared for the higher level game. |
Anonymous
| At our games last weekend, the 2 teams that beat us got a leg up on us pressing and causing some turnovers which converted into points and we got behind early. We were a team that only had 1/2 our kids and the other half came to fill in (no reclasses) so we weren't use to playing together and the press got us early. |
Anonymous
So many teams win by pressing aggressively early and trying to get the other team on the back foot, especially when kids are younger. By 15U, my kid was on a well coached team that had 4-5 great press breaks, and they’d slice up the press for easy baskets. It’s amazing how the psychological momentum shifts when a team that’s used to bullying with the press sees the other team get quick points with long passes to guys who are open under the basket or in the corner. Some teams, pressing was all they knew how to do, so they’d keep at it, even after 10 easy points in a row. It was sad but funny. |
Anonymous
Sorry, but this is way overstated. NBA and NCAA teams will pick up opponents full court and use zone defense in certain situations. The OKC 2-3 zone is widely covered by the media. |
Anonymous
| Our team has had to use zone quite a few times due to the size advantage of other teams. We have seen our share of reclass players (we have none) and have played 13u teams with 3 or more 6' and over players. While we do try to use man as much as possible, playing zone when very undersized has helped us compete |
Anonymous
NBA teams ran zone on less than 4% of possessions this past season and that was down from 2024. Typical NBA game has around 95-100 possession, so you're talking about running zone for about one possession per quarter and usually as a tactic to catch an opponent off guard and steal a possession (remember, 24 second shot clock doesn't leave much time for in possession adjustments, even better if you deploy the zone deep into the shot clock). I think that data suggests the zone is a gimmick in the NBA, but you may have a different read. To be fair, the Miami Heat were a massive outlier running zone around 20% of their possessions, but that also means they moved the league average up. As far as full court defense in the NBA, it is a light, low risk pressure. The full court pressure is not meant to cause turnovers (that would involve more trapping and more risk to the defense). Rather, NBA full court pressure is meant to slow the ball down enough with the intent of burning two or three seconds off the shot clock thus giving the offense a lower margin of error. The light pressure also prevents the offense from getting into quick hitting sets. Light pressure in the NBA (or heavy full court man from a few individual NBA players) is not a press in any shape, form or fashion as you see it at the youth level. In the NCAA, only two teams have won a national championship heavily utilizing a zone since 1990: in 1990, UNLV ran a hard press with an amoeba zone and Syracuse in 2003 who had a generational freshmen and still only barely won the national title. Interestingly, one of the heaviest present-day users of zone in the NCAA--Scott Drew at Baylor-- won the national title in 2021 exclusively running a pressure, no middle man defense (no zone). A few teams have made final four runs since 1990 running a zone and zone concepts, but by and large they have fallen short of victory. As for pressing in the NCAA, the 1990s saw three primarily pressings teams win a national title: UNLV, Arkansas (Forty Minutes of Hell) and Rick Pitino's Kentucky team (interestingly, Tubby Smith walked back the press after replacing Pitino and Smith still won a title in 1999). Billy Donovan's Florida team also strategically pressed in the mid-2000s en route to a couple of national titles, but that's it (not a surprise, Billy Donovan was Rick Pitino's star pupil). A few less traditional teams have ridden a press to the final four (notably Shaka Smart at VCU, and Lob City at FGCU--and I can't remember if Bob Huggins' 2011 WVU team ran a press or not). Tellingly, a lot of coaches have attempted to run traditional presses and it has cost them their jobs. Mike Anderson being the most glaring example when he tried to bring 40 Minutes of Hell back to Arkansas and then at Mizzou. Perhaps with respect to pressing in the NCAA, my comment is overstated (certainly not "way" overstated). Otherwise, with respect to zone in the NCAA/NBA and pressing in the NBA, they are gimmicks not seriously deployed with any material frequency. |
Anonymous
Is the point to compete or to develop? I am not knocking you. I myself have given in to running a zone to stay in games when I had younger teams. I'm just adamant that we have a lack of skill hitting the upper high school grades in the game and I don't know what the answer is. I get it. I really do. Nobody wants to consistently get their heads figuratively beat in. And I have a picture of my then-12U kid guarding a kid at least a full 15 inches taller and probably 100 pounds heavier than him. Maybe the solution is to not permit a zone or press when leading by some margin? |
Anonymous
I’m the PP. I was surprised to read that there are kids with good fundamentals who struggle to develop an understanding of team basketball. I always figured that if kids watch enough games and play enough 2 on 2 and 3 on 3 they’d naturally get there. My kid was lucky in getting in with an offseason training group of older, very much better kids as an 8th grader, and they’d do drills and 3 on 3 for hours at least once a week at an empty church court. Those kids moved faster and passed much harder, so when I’d watch freshman and JV games they seemed slower and sort of lazier than the 3 on with the older kids. Also, DS learned habits from those kids like sprinting down court in transition when he saw a teammate getting a steal. |