@approxinfinity
First, I am not talking about John Calipari, Sean Miller, Coach K, or any other actual coach here, or any actual shoe company here, or even the actual NCAA D1 college basketball industry, or whatever one should call it. I am speculating hypothetically about a hypothetical cartel regime (not specifying as basketball) in which distribution of net benefits to cartel members stemming from acquiring, developing and marketing a raw material, or alternatively, a human resource, serving as a basic input to a good or service, involved a member, or members, electing not to cooperate with the cartel's agreed upon parceling out of that raw material, or human resource, because that distribution was asymmetric, and so less net beneficial to certain members that as a result, have grown noncompliant, or at least partially so.
In short, I am hypothesizing a non specific cartel in order to try to explore and understand cartel dynamics first, before seeing if they might have any feasible fit coincident with college basketball recruiting dynamics. I am not yet sure that they do.
Regarding a hypothetical coach talking directly with hypothetical shoecos about hypothetical talent distributions, I would doubt such would occur. My doubt results from a college coaching system reputedly dating back several decades involving a reputed tradition of coaching "motion plays" (see "College Sports, Inc." by Murray Sperber, Professor Emeritus, Indiana University, 1990) to avoid, or manage, sensitive issues related to recruiting, etc. Recall this is reputedly a system in which head coaches are sometimes found not to have known about rather egregious infractions. So: in this hypothetical cartel thought experiment, if you will, it seems improbable to me, if we were to try to specialize it to college basketball recruiting, that head coaches and shoecos would directly discuss such things as hypothetical talent distributions. But as a layman and an outsider looking in at the reality of D1 college basketball and its recruiting processes, I would have no way of knowing.
Regarding distinguishing between "cutting off supply" and "ousting" in this hypothetical, "cutting off supply" would involve reducing, then shutting off the supply of a raw material to a noncompliant cartel member, whereas "ousting" would imply removal of that member from the cartel.
Again, at this point, I am not even sure that a cartel model has a feasible fit with D1 college basketball.
It is just somewhere to start hypothetically to begin to try to search for a fitting explanation of recent recruiting phenomena.
Oligopoly models might also be hypothesized.
And other models as well.
I picked cartels only because of the rather sharp asymmetries in distributions that to me seem strongly counter intuitive to a market with a flat playing field and one determined mostly by available rotation PT and coaching record.
Were there a level playing field, and were the coaching record decisive, then for one example, one would now expect domestic OAD big recruits in the 6-9 to 7-0 range to be flocking to KU this season, because KU has none on the team this season, none signed for next season, and has a coach and program known for producing top big men that get drafted and make good livings in the NBA.
It could be that all the long bigs waiting may in fact flock to KU in the late signing period, but a recent analysis by @konkeyDong, if I recall correctly, suggested that did not seem the case so far, anyway. So: it prompted me to hypothesize a bit. Hope this helps.