With the Syracuse Orange men’s basketball team struggling to defend and to keep the ball out of the high-post through its first six games, Jim Boeheim sat at his home in Fayetteville and toiled away with a new idea.
The Orange 2-3 zone had been sliced up by Colgate through the high-post and diced by Auburn in the Battle 4 Atlantis with lob after lob. So, the head coach grappled with the thought of tinkering his storied zone. He sketched it on a napkin and tweaked the two top defenders of the 2-3. Or, rather than a 2-3, the alteration most closely resembled Lute Olson’s 1-1-3 zone.