OKC Thunder Head Coach Explains Looks Team Gets Against Zone Defenses

The Oklahoma City Thunder have faced a zone defense for 174 possessions this season. In those possessions, the Thunder are posting 1.116 points per possession ranking in the 77th percentile. This has been a strategy teams have began deploying more in the past month against OKC. Head coach Mark Daigneault discussed these looks before tip-off of Wednesday's Golden State Warriors game.
"Yeah, I mean, it's part of a broader question. Which is, you need to have a menu of attacks for different schemes that teams are going to throw at you, and the better you are, the more you see the schemes. So we get blitzed, mainly with Shai (Gilgeous-Alexander). Teams run at us, that happened in the Dallas game last week, in the Cleveland game as well, at home, team zone. So we've got to be ready to attack all those things and be ready to pivot to them quickly when a team draws on them. Usually a team doesn't start doing that stuff, they adjust to that in a game, and we've got to adjust just as quickly," Daigneault said.
The Thunder bench boss is right. Teams have not typically deployed a zone defense until the second half. Specifically after superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander gets going. It has caused a hiccup in Oklahoma City's offense throughout the season and something they have to adjust to.
"So that's the first part, and with zone specifically, there's tradeoffs that you're making when you play zone defensively. You know, you don't turn teams over as much usually, you don't rebound quite as well usually versus your man-to-man. You give up more threes, the quality of those threes tend to be pretty good. But you can take away the rim. You don't foul as much, and so if you invert that and look at it offensively, you're trying to generate quality threes, you're trying to get on the offensive glass, and trying to scrap for, you know, rim and fouls if teams are going to do that. But you've got to take what they give you," The Head coach explained.
While this has been a constant storyline this season, there is not much cause for panick just yet as the sample size is still small, within the range for variance.
"So, you know, we got zoned against Dallas, and going back and watching those plays and looking at our numbers on that. The expected value of those possessions was higher than they were in reality, and so sometimes you've just got to stay on track and stay at it. If you look back at the Cleveland game, in Cleveland it was the opposite. We weren't generating good enough shots and we had to get kind of back to the drawing board after that one. So it's like anything else, we're just progressing through it but there's ups and downs. There's sometimes some noise in an individual game, but we've got to be zoned on us tonight. I would expect them to at different times, and so we've got to be ready to attack," Daigneault added.
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