Coming out to start the third quarter, Slovenia found themselves trailing Greece by 12 points, giving up 37 points in the first 20 minutes of basketball.  In the third quarter, Slovenia held Greece to just 7 points, and after outscoring Greece by 14 points, they found themselves up 2 points entering the fourth quarter.  If you didn’t watch the game, but saw that Slovenia played zone for much of the third quarter, you would be inclined to assume that Slovenia’s zone was fantastic, and it was really effective in stopping Greece.  However, that wasn’t the case, as Slovenia’s zone was sloppy, lazy, and they allowed themselves to be stretched way to easily.

The zone that Slovenia was playing was a 3-2 zone, with the two wings on the zone playing really wide, all the way out to the three point line.  Obviously, the goal of this zone was to deny Greece any looks from the three point line (either up top or on the wing), but what that does is it stretches out the defense and leaves a HUGE gap at the top of the key.  Because of that gap, Slovenia needs to rotate quickly with the basketball:

On this first possession (or any possession to be completely honest), they don’t do that.  Greece gets the basketball to the wing and flash a player to the middle.  The defense has to react, and they have to rotate (again, covering a lot of ground) with Greece’s fantastic ball movement.  Eventually, there is a huge driving lane and Greece is able to take advantage and get the lay-up.

The next trip down the court, Greece seems to be expecting the zone, run the same set from the first possession, and this time they hit the man flashing to the middle (Again, because Slovenia’s 2 wings were so wide, the middle was wide open), who misses the shot, but because Greece was able to get the ball to the underbelly of the zone, they were able to create an offensive rebounding opportunity for Kosta Koufos, who tips the miss home.

Two possessions in, it looked like Slovenia’s zone experiment was going horribly wrong.  One or two more straight scores, and Greece would get Slovenia to abandon the zone and force them to go back to man to man (where Greece had a number of mismatches).  However, all of a sudden, Greece just stopped trying to get the basketball into the middle of the court, instead trying to work the ball on the outside and running the same set over and over:

The first set that Greece ran during this scoreless stretch was a set where they were using their bigs to try and set off ball screens on the wings to free up the skip pass on the wing.  With the big setting screens, they are being occupied and are now unable to flash to the middle, which is playing right into Slovenia’s hands.

Greece then started running a play, where they would give the basketball to a big on the wing, have him swing the ball towards the corner, and then flash through.  It’s a nice motion that tries to take advantage of the hole in Slovenia’s zone (they get the ball there the first time, but the cutter looses his feet), however, when you run the play over and over, Slovenia picks up on it, and they start defending it better.  That is exactly what happens.

With the perceived success that Slovenia had with their zone, you knew that they were going to enter the fourth quarter and go back to it at some point.  They eventually do, but this time, Greece is prepared for it.  In the break between the 3rd and the 4th quarter, the Greek coach had to have talked to his team about getting the ball into the middle of the zone, because that was the primary focus of their offense:

Now, with multiple flashers to the middle of the lane, Greece has bigs in position to not only grab offensive rebounds and get easy shots at the rim, but to draw defenders and then free up open shooters (Instead of looking for three pointers directly, the fact that they were looking middle first they were actually opening up the three point shot).

Credit to Slovenia for finding a way to slow down Greece in the third quarter.  With the zone, you don’t always have to run it sharply, but if you can get the offense out of what they were doing well and get them out of sync, the zone is successful, and that is definitely what happened in the third quarter.  However, if you are the Slovenia coaching staff, you had to have seen the gaps in your zone and realize that your success was more Greece failing then you playing good defense.  Once Greece started getting the ball in the middle of the zone in the fourth quarter, that’s when you need to abandon it.

Greece made the great adjustment to finally try and work the ball to the middle, and that is when they were able to get into positions where they could get open looks.