Zone Defense in the NBA, 2025-26 edition

Is zone on the rise? How much zone is played in the NBA?

Around this time every season (happy New Year!), I check in to see if zone defense is becoming a bigger thing. Traditional full-on zones are a very small part of NBA defense, and that hasn’t changed much in 2025-26, as we’ll see below (although there has been a good amount of fluctuation when looking at specific teams compared to prior seasons, which is fun!).

But zone defensive principles have become increasingly important since the NBA altered the rules in the early 2000s, allowing players to guard space rather than just their marks.

Now, essentially every defensive possession involves some sort of zoning up — think nail-help principles, or tagging the roller, or low-man-help defense, or the NBA’s increasingly brazen tendency to disregard non-shooters on the perimeter to muck things up in the middle. Watch Houston’s Alperen Şengün completely ignore an Orlando player in the corner to zone up in the paint and get the game-saving block on Desmond Bane:

That play, seen in some variation in dozens of defensive possessions every single game, would’ve been illegal in the prior century, as I wrote a few months ago for HoopsHype in an article detailing how defenses have changed over time.

You can click that link for more detailed explanations of how zone is involved everywhere, so let’s get into the updated numbers. A year ago, I covered the history of zone over the last decade, so we’ll focus on current data today.

Here is the share of possessions teams spend in full-on zone for the 2025-26 season compared to last year: