@drgnslayr
You are so right to note that the last two KU teams under-performed in March; i.e., seemed to play beneath their abilities and levels of performance earlier in the season.
Self has clearly NOT learned how to control when a team peaks and he has talked about trying to design and develop a team to be ready for the tournament, so we know he is trying to get the hang of it.
Wooden decided that the best way to get a team ready for the tournament involved the following:
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make the team believe, regardless of level of talent it possesses, it will be the best conditioned team all season long and in the tournament;
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create an offensive scheme that it runs to perfection from the beginning of the season, regardless of who it plays, in order to get the team focused not on what it is doing, but how close to perfection it can get doing it (be so predictable to an opponent that occasional surprises invariably work);
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eliminate all non-goal oriented activities and behaviors during the season during practice (no joking around during work, keep practices short and densely active);
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focus all minds on the UCLA way in pursuit of singleness of purpose and focus and elimination of distraction;
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eliminate victory as the measure of accomplishment for one can win playing badly sometimes;
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the criteria of success for each person and the for the team is did we practice, or play, to the best of our abilities that day;
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use only players with fire in their bellies for only that fire can drive players to focus all season on being the best they can be every time they step on a court (being the best they can be every moment is not viewed as an impossible ideal, but a goal always within reach for those willing to work);
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all activities related to basketball must contribute to the team goal of the players becoming the best each can be in their roles of making the team the best it can be; thus there can be no stars, only great players; thus great players must be shielded from the star making system; thus the players on the team that contribute the least must be equals as teammates of the greatest contributors for the only way the team can become its best EVERY practice and EVERY game is for EVERY player to work to be the best that he can be at whatever his role is;
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hard work at becoming the best a team can be is the litmus test for potentially great teams;
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competitive greatness is the acid test distinguishing potentially great players and teams from great players teams.
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standard is "at your best when you need your best and you need your best every day."
The key to Wooden's greatness was that he trained his players every moment of contact with them to be their best and to make their team its best. The normal distribution of human performance was known to him. I believe he thought that the way to win was not to accept the normal distribution as something to scheme around, but rather that the entire normal distribution of the individual and the team could raised upwards dramatically over the course of a season by habituating being at your best when you need our best and recognizing that you need your best every second in order to reach your best.
Players "with good motors" is a modern euphemism for players with fire in their bellies. Thomas Robinson had a great motor. Tyshawn Taylor discovered he had a great motor his last season. Sherron Collins had a great motor that unfortunately drove him to eat to escape it. Kevin Young had maybe the greatest motor of them all. Tyrel Reed had a great motor that did not pass the eye test. Joel Embiid had a great motor until he was injured. Frank Mason so far looks like a guy with a good motor.
But here is the critical difference between Self's KU teams and Wooden's UCLA teams. Every player on Wooden's teams--at least those one saw in the rotation, but likely even those on the bench too--had a great motor. They had to have one, or he would not take them.
Wooden was reputedly attracted to African American players in the beginning, because they were a group of players not being used because of prejudice (he was a young coach looking for an edge), and in part because he reputedly believed they experienced so much adversity in their lives that if he found one with ability and enough fire in his belly to survive the pernicious effects of racism, that that player probably had competitive greatness hard wired inside him. One can debate whether this implied a subtle kind of racism in Wooden, but one cannot plausibly debate that he knew how to recognize and attract players with competitive greatness. People often forget that Wooden played over the years many African American and many Caucasian American players that were not considered "better talents" than what were on opposing teams. But I can never recall a Wooden player being outworked and out hustled, and very rarely was their competitive greatness exceeded either.
Compare Self's teams, where about half the players on Self's teams have good motors, sometimes less than half.
Therein lies a key difference between Bill Self and John Wooden.
Bill Self has found a way of playing the game that has let win a higher percentage of his games and many more conference titles and one more ring than John Wooden won in the first half of his career. It is a heady, remarkable accomplishment by Self. It is to be respected and applauded and praised to outdo the greatest coach of all time in the first half of one's career.
But to put it in perspective, Wooden's first half of his career was spent in the back water programs of Indiana State and UCLA, which was converted juco and inconsequential commuter school and ugly sibling to Cal Berkely through out the first half of Wooden's career. Wooden NEVER got to coach at an elite program, as Self has done the last ten years. Wooden had to create his own elite program the second half of his career. He had no tradition to "sell" as Self likes to say. And the first half of his career, he didn't even sell what he had to sell: SoCal climate, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, beaches, and babes. Guys contacted him to play for him, He did not contact them. When Wooden finally started using Jerry Norman to recruit the very same way elite programs did, i.e., with alumni booster money under the table, Wooden began winning titles AND rings, first with lesser talent, then with greater talent. Never forget Wooden's first two ring teams had distinctly lesser talent than the elite teams of the country at that time. Never forget that one of his lesser talented teams went 32-0.
Bill Self found a way to win 60-70% of his games at lesser programs with lesser talent. He found a way to take lesser talent to an Elite Eight. It got him a shot at coaching Illinois, where he won a heady rate; that got him to KU where he has been brilliant in winning 82% of his games, ten titles and one ring.
But the last two teams, which have fallen short of expectations due largely to injuries, have also not played up even to the abilities of the talent that remained. Bill Self said last year's team was not tough enough, as if that explained the flame out last year. But the team the year before WAS tough enough, yet it was not at its best when it needed its best either.
When Bill Self met UK in the finals and lost to a vastly more talented team, he had no trouble diagnosing the problem and the Petro ShoeCo dynamics enabled him to shift gears to recruit vastly more talented players--OADs to be exact.
But the last two seasons indicate that he faces another obstacle to pursuing becoming the best he can be.
He does not have enough guys on his team with good motors, with fire in their bellies, with competitive greatness.
And whereas it took Bill Self only one loss in one game to recognize he needed more talented players, it is taking him (so far) two seasons to recognize that he needs more players with good motors in the rotation, more players with competitive greatness, more players that are at their best when they need their best and that understand that they need their best every day in order to habituate that into being reliably produced under the severe conditions of March Madness three weekends in a row, two games each weekend, under the withering spotlight of Big Media.
And it concerns me that Bill Self has concluded that toughness was what was lacking last season.
Toughness can only take you so far.
Toughness can take you through the one third bad games, but it cannot raise the level of performance in all of your games, so that KU's one third bad games are not only sharply better than other team's one third bad games, but also sharply better than their average games. And toughened talent alone cannot condition you to be at your best for six games WHEN YOU NEED YOUR BEST!
From my fan's iSeat, SELF HAS TO RECOGNIZE THAT COMPETITIVE GREATNESS IS NOW THE UNDER-SUPPLIED INGREDIENT IN HIS TEAMS OF VERY TALENTED CHARACTERS.
It may be his greatest challenge so far in his career, because it is quite likely that he, as a player, had great work ethic, great toughness, was a great character, and had a brilliant basketball IQ, and charisma, to boot, but lacked competitive greatness, or never played for a coach that had it and so did not know how to bring it out of him, and coach him up to it, when he was a player. Competitive greatness may be a blind spot in Bill Self.
(Note: it apparently is in John Calipari and Stumpy Miller, for though they are getting the best players in the greatest numbers both coaches' records so far indicate that while they can win a lot of games and go deep in the Madness, winning rings remains largely a randomized event for Calipari, and a mystery to Stumpy.
Mind blindness is the greatest obstacle of all to getting better at anything. Mind blindness means you cannot even see and conceptualize what it is you are not doing. Mind blindness means when someone tells you you are not doing something you need to do to get better, you cannot even grasp what it is they are talking about. Mind blindness means that even when someone tells you what to do you cannot understand it until they find a way to visualize the problem for you. Mind blindness is like looking at Vanna White pointing at a bunch of boxes with not letters showing and having no clue what even MIGHT be the word. Mind blindness means you just keep mistaking probable solutions, and randomly trying solutions.'
But the great thing about mind blindness (at least the part that means one does not need to feel hopeless about it) is that if you can find someone that knows what it is you cannot see, because they can see it, and they can stop telling you what not to do, and stop telling you what to do, and start giving you a visual image of what is actually in the block of bad pixels in your Plasma TV in your head, suddenly your brain will burn in the nets and you will henceforth see what you have not been seeing, and then begin to use all of your formidable abilities, skills and experience, to supply what those bad pixels had been obscuring from, and supply clearly resolved solutions.
You know you have mind blindness about something when you do not make the logical inferences about what is the problem, so you are never able to look for the fitting solution.
This applies to and works with everyone at any age in any activity.
Never tell a person what they are doing wrong.
Never tell them what they ought to do right.
Find out what they cannot see and visualize it for them.
The get the hell out of the way and watch them solve it themselves.
Many things have contributed to champions of the past: great talent, great coaching, willingness to sacrifice for the good of the team, exposure to great teams and players during pre Conference, exposure to same during the conference win or lose, exposure to some great teams that were beaten instilling belief in a team's ability to conquer the best, and so on.
But the only constant theme through all the champions I have witnessed and can now more or less recall are two or three players with every game MUA, a team full of guys with great work ethics and a rotation full of players with competitive greatness.
This is what I hope some great coach living or dead through words spoken, or written down, can help visualize for Bill Self.
Play the guys with the great motors and competitive greatness, even if they have a little less talent.
Let Kevin Young be your guide.
They can be frustrating.
They can be out matched some times physically.
But the game is won inside a triangle with a corner at each ear and at the heart in the chest. Somehow this triangle includes competitive greatness. An outward indicator of it is a good motor. Talent is ante to any activity. Equal talent is required to play for the big pot. Competitive greatness decides who can survive the losses and surmount the obstacles of learning to and finally be at their best when they need their best during the long pursuit of the ultimate prize. Rings are not one in one game. Rings are a long process of winning many battles, overcoming all obstacles, winning every necessary battle, and winning the last battle.
Fill a rotation, or better yet a team, with players of equal talent to opponents and triangles brimming with more competitive greatness, and that will raise the normal distribution of your team's performance above the normal distribution of your opponents, and your teams will reach 99 percent of their potential, and in combination these will lead to winning rings without even listing doing so as a goal.
Rock Chalk!!!
