The NBA's Game of Zones
The state of NBA zone defense in 2025
“I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
—Bilbo Baggins, The Fellowship of the Ring
Why doesn’t the NBA like zone defense?
In a league filled with hundreds of the smartest tactical basketball minds in the world, you’d think there would be more usage of zone defense. And in some ways, you do see it more than ever. Teams will ignore an opponent’s biggest bricklayer to put a free safety in the middle of the floor; that’s zone. Switching defenses incorporate zone principles, and low-man helpers are precisely positioned in a way that’s at least zone-adjacent.
Zone can even be used as a de facto double team — think about how teams often guard Nikola Jokic. They’ll put a strong power forward on Jokic and have their center station himself right in front of the basket to protect against Jokic’s grinding, bullying drives.
In other words, the NBA has incorporated some zone into nearly all of their basic defensive tenets. Yet, to plagiarize my article from the last time I talked about this two years ago, full-on zone is rarely used. The league outlawed zone defense until the 2001-2002 season, and nobody has been in a rush to use it since it came back. Coaches have largely been reluctant to explore zone possibilities except for brief stretches after a dead ball (when zone is used to thwart offensive plays designed to attack man defenses). The defensive three-second rule defangs most zones, and the common thought is that NBA players are too good at shooting and passing for a zone to be effective. Guarding space instead of players also makes it challenging to find the right man to box out when a shot goes up. Etcetera, etcetera.
There are always exceptions. Sometimes, teams use zone because their players are simply too bad at defense to play man — the Miami Heat are a good example. They use funky zones to put players like Tyler Herro and Duncan Robinson in the least damaging positions while stationing strong defenders like Jimmy Butler (adios!) and Bam Adebayo in the most important real estate.
Other teams use it to mix things up, throwing different looks at opposing stars to get them out of their comfort zone (particularly if said stars are poor passers). It might only last for a possession or two, but anything that can slow the mental processing of the other team’s alpha will always find niche uses.
Unfortunately, despite my yearning for it to be otherwise, I’m sad to report that full-blown zone defense is, if anything, on the downswing. Look at this fun box-and-whisker chart I created below. If you’re unfamiliar with this graph type, or a bit fuzzy since you likely haven’t seen one since middle school, here’s the explanation. The short version: the box extends from the 25th to the 75th percentiles, the “X” is the mean, the “whiskers” cover most of the rest of the range, and the little dots are statistical outliers.
[Data from Synergy Sports]
You’ll notice a few things.
First, nobody except Dallas ran zone before 2018-19. Dallas’ coach at the time is current Indiana coach Rick Carlisle, and he used some zone defenses to help protect an aging Dirk Nowitzki (the Pacers under Carlisle have dabbled in zone more than most teams, too).
But in 2018-19, half the league’s teams started using at least a smattering of zone (almost exclusively on out-of-bounds plays), a trend that slowly continued.
The median usage of zone never rose above 3%. Miami was the only team that used zone consistently from a position of strength, and it’s no surprise you see them as an outlier almost every single year, peaking with more than 20% of their possessions in 2022-23.
Under former coach James Borrego, Charlotte loved themselves a good zone, too. At the start of his coaching career, Portland’s Chauncey Billups resorted to zone quite frequently, but that’s tailed off some.
Overall, though, you can see that the vast majority of teams still aren’t using much zone, and if anything, that number has decreased in 2024-25.
(In case you’re wondering, the data is fuzzier for the playoffs, but we don’t see a major increase there, either, although the Pacers did use it a good amount on their way to the Eastern Conference Finals.)
Now, let’s zero in on this season’s data and look at individual teams.