Kentucky's zone defense is only for certain situations, but they 'practice it every day.'

Mark Pope didn’t need to bust out a zone defense this season until the Gonzaga game. But when he did, it completely changed the momentum.

A 16-point halftime lead for the Bulldogs quickly disappeared as Kentucky implemented a 1-3-1 zone that stymied the Gonzaga offense. The Zags shot 54.3 percent from the field in the first half but just 38.9 percent in the second half and overtime. With help from the zone, Kentucky overcame a massive deficit and went on to win in overtime, 90-89.

To be clear, Pope didn’t utilize the 1-3-1 defense on every possession in the second half. If anything, it was brought out on every third or fourth possession on average — if that. And even then, Kentucky would almost immediately switch to man defense after a pass from Gonzaga. Only a couple of times did the 1-3-1 zone play out for an entire defensive possession.

But that was the plan, to mix up the defensive tactics just enough to throw Gonzaga off from what was a beautiful first half of offense by Mark Few‘s crew. It clearly worked. Gonzaga went from dropping 50 points in the first half to only 29 in the second. They shot 0-9 from deep in the second half.

“The execution that we wanted to do was just confuse them a little bit, slow them down a little bit, mess up their flow, and see how they reacted to it,” Kentucky fifth-year forward Ansley Almonor said on Tuesday. “They didn’t react that well. I think it worked.”

“Just to keep the offense off balance,” Sophomore center Brandon Garrison added. “They don’t know whether we’re in a zone, how fast we’re gonna get in man. If they call a zone play for instance and then we switch to man, it’ll mess up their whole offense. Just getting the offense off rhythm.”

This was the first time all season we truly saw Pope roll out a zone and go back to it, but it’s not anything his players weren’t prepared to execute. “We practice it every day,” Garrison said. It’s sort of like a ‘break-in-case-of-emergency’ type thing. Being down 16 points at the half in what was essentially a road game seems glass-breaking worthy to me. Pope’s guys were more than ready to handle the emergency, too.

“We practice that a good amount, for situations like that,” Almonor said. “When the opposing offense has good flow or they’re scoring a lot, just throw something different at them to see how they react to that. And it worked.”

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