Drop coverage did not die, it just stopped being the default

Every season somebody declares the scheme obsolete, and every season a team wins games with it because they have the right centre.

The story goes that pull up shooting killed the drop. The big man sits back near the rim, the ball handler comes off the screen, and if he can make that shot from eighteen or twenty five feet consistently, the coverage hands it to him. Therefore drop is finished, and everybody must switch or blitz.

I think that reasoning is right about the mechanism and wrong about the conclusion, because it treats a scheme as a belief rather than a tool.

What drop actually buys you is enormous. It keeps your centre near the basket, which protects against the drive and puts your best rebounder in position when the shot goes up. It keeps everybody in their own matchup, so there are no mismatches to hunt and no scramble to rotate out of. It fouls less than blitzing does. It is the lowest variance coverage in basketball, and low variance has value that nobody puts on a chart.

The cost is a specific shot given up to a specific player. That is a bounded, known cost. You can decide, opponent by opponent, whether you would rather concede it than concede a switch onto a guard or a four on three after a trap.

Against a team whose primary handler is an excellent pull up shooter, drop is bad. That is a small number of players. Against everyone else, and particularly against handlers who are dangerous getting downhill but ordinary from mid range, drop is often the correct answer and it lets a slow footed centre stay on the floor in a playoff series where he would otherwise be unplayable.

The genuine change is that no team can run one coverage all night any more, because good offences will call the same action repeatedly until you show them you have another answer. Drop as the default for forty eight minutes is dead. Drop as one of four things you show, chosen by who has the ball, is thriving.

And there is a quiet advantage in variety itself. A handler who has to identify the coverage before he commits is a handler making a decision half a second later than he wants to.

Half a second is most of what defence is.