@HighEliteMajor
You have raised Self's conservatism persuasively on a number of occasions. Even got me thinking seriously about it.
Now, after having studied the roster of his 32-5 Elite Eight Tulsa team in 1999-2000, wherein he played very, very small ball AND had 5 of his 6 man rotation hoisting treys, even when they weren't great trey shooters, I want to get you to think about and try to explain what the difference is between the Self of 1999-2000 and the Self of 2014-2015. Is there a difference? Is he inflexible, brilliantly flexible, or moderately flexible?
Clearly, Self was willing once to play small ball when forced to by his talent. But he did more than play small ball with that Tulsa team. He turned it into a trey balling flying circus with an absolutely miniscule rotation. That was way outside the envelope of that time in college basketball. That was the time of XTReme Thug Ball Version 1.o. That was the time of the Wisconsin-Michigan State national championship slugfest in which both offense and defense were reduced to forearm shivers, plus blocking and tackling. Mateen "the meat cleaver" Cleeves was the poster boy PG of the era. And yet Self went 180 opposite the trend that season. He went with five trey ball triggering short and athletics that guarded their hearts out and became superb at 70 point take what they give us played up and under.
Then he went to Illinois and played a bunch of Lon Kruger's residual muscle men, and tasted Ratso Izzo's brass knuckle sandwiches and other forms of Big Ten maul ball, and really got queer for adapting the Iba hi-lo aka Dean's and Larry's Xcellent Adventure in the Carolina Passing Offense aka Eddie Ball into an XTReme Muscle hybrid. If you let us run a way from you we will. If you force us to muscle with you, we will. And so on.
Then he gets to KU and rides a short wide body post, a 4 on steroids, in Simien to the Elite Eight.
Then he gets serious about signing length, and gets catholic about the hi-lo basics: stretch the D with open look 40% trey shooters combined with a wide variety of long bigs.
The long bigs are where Self has been the most brazen in trying the outrageous IMHO. They range from two stretch 4s playing 4 and 5 in the Morri, to pairing an undersized rim protector in Mad Stork Cole and stretch 4 Marcus, to pairing a no offense footer rim protector Withey with an inverted pyramid fore arm smashing dunk machine in TRob, to pairing rim protector Withey with perhaps the greatest anomaly in the history of college basketball--6-7 180 power forward KY. And don't forget that the ring team played a 6-8 power forward at center, a 6-9 shooting forward at power forward, and a 6-10 260 Ruskie back up center without knees that could neither rebound, nor score.
This constitutes perhaps the most extraordinary clinic in exploring the varied approaches to playing an offense I can recall. Maybe Wooden tried more variations on his high post, but even Wooden jump shifted when he had Jabbar and Walton to the low post offense.
Compare the variety of Self's approaches within his hi-lo to the rote sameness of Cal's teams within the dribble drive offense at Memphis and UK. Cal seems never to change a thing about how they play the dribble drive offense and the defenses never change either.
Compared to Cal, Self is like Picasso morphing into yet another virtuoso form of hi-lo every couple years. Talent seems to hugely dictate how Self plays his hi-lo, where as Cal lets the dribble drive dictate what his conveyor belt of Mickey Ds do. Ball screen, dribble drive, create. Ball screen, dribble drive, create. Throw it inside. Repeat.
Cal just keeps letting Nike feed him Mickey Ds and lining them up exactly the same way and, regardless of the heights of the players at the positions year to year, they run the same ball screen and dribble drive isolations without change year after year.
Self's offenses have varied from into low block Simien turn and shoot, to mostly pick and role during Cole's years. to stretch 4 and stretch 5 with trey ball wings out of the cradle endlessly stretching, to playing three short perimeter guys, to playing three long perimeter guys, to...well, you get the idea.
We've seen him run the stay-on-the-spots hi-lo and the slide-off-the-spots hi-lo. Now he is talking about staying on the lines high lo, which inplies the possibility of a veering off the lines hi-lo, too.
The only thing Self hasn't varied much is relying on a half court defense, but even the way they have played half court defense has varied widely from XTReme Disruption in '08 to no disruption and just guarding the trey stripe and rim protection last season in order to win the FTA battle.
How do we square our sense of his conservatism, which, as I have said, you sometimes make persuasively, with all of this extraordinary variation within limits in his career?
Since adopting the dribble drive offense, Cal doesn't vary at all. He's like Old Faithful. Watch Derek Rose, then watch Marcus whatever his name was on the Davis ring team. The almost the identical dribble drive actions. From CDR to Kidd-Gilchrist. Not a speck of difference in the dribble drive offensive sets and actions they are running.
What exactly does Self's conservatism mean, when he so dramatically morphs the hi-lo every season or two?
I keep coming back to extraordinary variation with limits to describe Self.
So: its apparently the limits that make you find him conservative.
Not sure if you find Cal as conservative as I do. Cal is progressive in recruiting alright, progressive perhaps to the point of never knowing what is being done wrong by alums in his behalf. But in terms scheming? That would be no. He adopted a new offense from a high school coach; that was fresh. But since then, the names change but what is done with the offense seems to stay the same.
And Self is very quick to steal from what works for others, at least from that which can be integrated into his hi-lo system in pieces.
And he also pioneers things, like let the other team set the tempo, that guys like Calhoun, with Ollie at his side assisting, essentially copy completely.
What UConn did the last few years under Calhoun and then Ollie last season really comes out of Self Ball. It appeared to me that LB had been coming to Self's practices the last few years and then tutoring Ollie on what Self was doing a couple years back and passing it to Calhoun, as UNC assistant Larry Brown once learned the hi lo from Iba and passed it to Dean.
May be it is the limits of NOT going to full time, full court zone pressing that makes him seem conservative to us at times.
But there just was nothing conservative about the 2012 runner up team. It was sand bagging entire games for wins. What Tyshawn did was practically the prototype for what Shabazz and UConn did last season.
Part of me worries that Self is not passing an eye test for maverick thinkers in today's media culture.
He is once conventionally WASP leading man handsome--classic square face structure, straight hair (plugged or not) and that mixture of handsome and a little goofy.
He speaks with an Okie accent.
He seems corporate jock/fraternity brother smooth.
No Meadow Lands mousse like Cal, or whatever he is wearing these days.
No 'hood slangin' like Ollie.
No slick omerta schtick like Ratso and Slick Rick.
No toos and pierced earrings.
No Tom Ford skinny suits.
No John Thompson 1.0 glasses, black suit, white shirt, black tie accidental allusions to the Nation of Islam and the honorable Elijah Muhammad.
No red neck Bob Knight golf sweaters with a fishing pole in the back of the pickup stuff.
No "I made it mamma" son of Polish immigrant and Army chic like K.
(Note: I admire all of these styles of all these coaches past and present for their stylish idiosyncracies.)
Do we have a basketball maverick and genius here in Self being obscured by the aging mayonaisse and wonder bread frat house look in the age of "whitey-gonna-be-a-minority-in-20-year" speak?
Or do we have a bonafide basketball conservative and sports fundamentalist inflexible?
Lay your thoughts down when you get a chance.
Slug it: getting to know our coach and our eye prescriptions.
We are sailing into harms way with a short fleet.
We need to know our admiral.
