I didn't mean to downplay the successes of the 2-3 in the middle of the year, or the occasional 3-2 and the zone press. Those things may have saved our year in a meaningful way in the middle part of the season. I'm thrilled we mixed it up more on defense.
What I meant to address is that a lot of posters (on TDD, but even here, too) were saying things like
1) Pressure man-to-man worked X years ago, but is totally anachronistic now
and
2) Why would you ever play man-to-man defense with this team? They can't do it.
Both of which were certainly proven false. The tournament run featured man-to-man nearly all the time, and ball-denial pressure most of the time, and found a good deal of success.
Rome: I would look at the larger body of results, and say that just because something doesn't work when you start two Plumlees side-by-side or when you have Jabari Parker just halfassedly pretending to play defense, if it works four times out of five, it's probably an argument in its favor.