(Note: blame @nuleafjhawk for this one. Not really. Actually it s just a response to his response to one of my posts. :-))
Exactly!
We are so fortunate to have Self and the wonderful players we have.
At the same time, we are so far through the looking glass here that everyone is screaming from the disorientation.
Self is taking this ship somewhere it has never been.
We are through a strait and in a new ocean.
He is doing it in a subtle way that no one, including his team quite grasps yet, probably because he is feeling his own way along.
Change and thinking hurt.
Trying to grasp what the metamorphis that is under way is like trying to squeeze mercury. It squirts in unpredictable directions every attempt.
What I like about this very hairy situation is that Self is the one doing the mapping and engineering here. He is fallible, but who would you rather be in uncharted waters with after the last ten years?
What I fear about this situation is that I just do not see how the pieces of mercury that he is working with are going to fuse into something capable of being a good team capable of beating ANY other good team on a night when that opponent is having a good game.
Of the coaches that have confronted the contraption that Self is gerry rigging as he goes, two smart ones--Dunphy and Cal--saw through it and stepped on its central struts and broke it. The two teams have quite different levels of talent. Thus talent is not the common thread of the two losses. It is good coaches with good talent not beating themselves that is the common thread.
Every win against a good team involved KU hanging around and the opponent beating itself. Both MSU and Florida self destructed. We did not beat them. They beat themselves and we were there to grab the W.
Dare I say it? This is Phog Ball reincarnated.
Most people today know that Phog Allen was the first genius of college basketball, but they do not understand what his genius actually was. Phog Allen was a genius innovator, on the one hand (note: virtually every form of offense and defense was tried by him first), and a genius at finding ways to let other teams self-destruct. The former genius of Allen's is somewhat recognized, but the latter was what really put 700+ Ws on his W&L statement through ebbs and flows of talent.
What I and others in our frustrations with what Self and his team are NOT doing that perhaps they could be doing have tended so far to overlook is: there really are two ways to beat someone.
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You beat them.
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They beat themselves with your assistance.
Kentucky beats teams. It overwhelms them with talent. It plays how it plays. You lose.
But you can play to help your opponent beat himself.
The current team is 10-2, because Self apparently decided that this team lacks sufficient pieces to beat most opponents straight up, regardless of what offensive and defensive schemes they might try; i.e., they lack the pieces to try to beat most opponents the Number 1 way.
So: Self being the acutely flexible and highly educated student of basketball's legacy that he is, Self has apparently gone all the way back to someone even the KU faithful have forgotten to develop a winning approach for his undermanned team.
Note: I am in this post going through the looking glass once again with Bill Self, as I have to do most seasons, sooner or later.
He had to drag me through kicking and screaming this time, because for a change I do differ with him about how this roster might best be used.
But here is the thing: I came to the same conclusion Self apparently did before the season started. Without Embiid, this roster remaining, lacked the necessary pieces for a champion that could find a way to beat the best at their best playing traditional Bill Ball-->Eddie Ball-->Larry Ball-->Hansen Ball-->Iba Ball.
The pieces weren't there.
But where I defaulted to the 2000 Tulsa teams and the Wooden's 1963 UCLA teams for models, Self apparently went back to Allen.
Allen's one constant thread was how do I use my material to best let other teams beat themselves.
It was almost as infuriating and mystifying a way to play the game to opponents as was Self's Tumble Weed Buddhism approach of the past ten years. Self let them set tempo. Take what they give us. Play it their way. 84% of the time opponents found themselves being able to do exactly what they wanted at what ever tempo they wanted to play at, only to find that Self Defense still biased the outcome to KU. The opponent walked off the floor bumfuzzled, whether the opponent had more talent, the same talent, or less talent. How did he do it? We got to run exactly what we wanted to? Why didn't we win? How the expletive did they beat us. They defended really well, but other teams have guarded us that well. What the hell just happened?
I have gone on at length with what happened the last ten years and everyone knows what I think happened--how Self has done it the last ten years.
But this year is different.
Self Ball used to actively try to beat opponents "their" way.
Self Ball used to actively try to beat opponents even if it sand bagged until the last 10-7 minutes to begin trying, as was the case with the 2012 Finals team.
Self Ball has mutated, at least for this season.
This season Self has turned games into glass bead games of letting opponents beat themselves.
Self is no longer sitting on the bench trying to figure out how to win; that is now boring to Magister Ludi.
Self is now trying to figure out how to make other teams lose.
It is a subtle, but important distinction, if one is trying to evaluate his moves.
This is I suppose the XTReme logical extension of Tumble Weed Buddhism rooted in the Iba legacy taken finally across an arc to the other parallel wire of Prairie Basketball--the Forest Allen Mt. Oread Wire.
Two wires, one arc rising, the wind began to howl...
So let us not talk falsely now, the season is getting late...
For you and I have been through that and it is not our fate...
All along the Ball Tower, the board rats came and went...
If I were asked to do some abstract public sculpture about this I would find the highest point of land between Stillwater, where Iba coached, and Lawrence, where Allen coached, and I would build two 100 foot tall lightening rods about 20 feet apart and an awesomely powerful electric generator--a kind of super sized model of one of those Frankenstein movie contraptions where the white arc of electricity rises sizzling slowly up to the top before discharging and repeating again and again.
The abstract Neo Modernist art work of high tech hoopism would be on prairie with a post rock barbed wire fence around it. The entrance would be title cryptically "The Allen-Iba Tower: Iterations 1-->N." It would be powered by a multi-hybrid driven electric generator using equal inputs in series from solar, wind, fracked coal gas. and burning cow dung.
It would look alien in purpose in the day light and menacing at night.
No one would ever get what it was about except a few KUBuckets.com board rats drawn helplessly to it once a year, like a bunch of Richard Dreyfusses drawn to Devils Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind .
The little sign explaining the giant sculpture would read: "First appeared on this site 9-11-01. Artist Unknown."
After 9-11, America adopted a pre-emptive war doctrine in which America not only ceased waiting to be attacked, but ceased trying to win the wars it started. The approach seems outrageous and unthinkable, but that is exactly what was done. Start endless wars. Don't try to win any of them. Hold our losses to a minimum, Hang around. Try to perpetuate the wars with counter terrorism actions until the opponent exhausts and beats themselves.
It is ghastly way to play at international relations. Sinister. Often indistinguishable from Evil. Becoming..."the enemy in the instant that we preach."
And yet it works...in an awful way.
If we are willing to endure the price of riskinglosing our own way of life, our own freedom from Big Brother, our own constitutional process, our own right to privacy, our own unconditional right to free speech and habeas corpus, etc. Not saying its gone. Saying its being put at risk.
America no longer wins wars.
America creates wars and hangs around waiting for opponents to beat themselves.
It is a bitter tasting way to play the game.
No one gets to be Ike, or Patton, achieving decisive victories.
We have Petraeuses now. Ambiguities capable of great good and unthinkable evils, that then are marginalized from our collective wake because we cannot bear to think of what they have done.
But as I said, "it works."
Once upon a time in a prairie long, long ago, a young acolyte of James Naismith, a Missourian named Forest Allen, proved the inventor of the game wrong. The game could be coached. But the young acolyte, a tirelessly curious and innovative type, stumbled, as if a character in an Indiana Jones movie, into a deep, deep insight, a knowledge that went back to the ancient past of warfare and competition. He discovered that the game could not only be coached, it could be coached not to beat opponents, but to help them beat themselves. It was a terrible dark discovery that few understood as such, because of the effervescent joy and optimism of the coach that discovered it. He was like Indiana Jones discovering the terrible beauty inside the lost arc of the covenant. He spoke of what he found in such disarming simplicities that it was hard to grasp the import of what he had found. He was like Indy discovering the terrible beauty of the holy grail and returning to Indiana U to teach sleepy students something that could not be comprehended without first hand experience. True knowledge, deep knowledge, is both beautiful and horrible. It is the character and intentions and uses of the those that discover it and live with it that makes for good, or evil outcomes. The weak can be destroyed by the deep knowledge. The strong can be made stronger and more virtuous and be delivered from peril by it.
Indiana Bill Allen is being tested this season.
He has become the father and the son recently in the midlife crisis.
But this is the holy ghost thing.
This is the big arc.
This is Indy standing on the face of the rock wall having to take the step onto the invisible bridge that may or may not be there, depending on how steadfast one's character and belief is.
He has discovered the deep truth buried in a vault far under Allen Field House, a vault beside the vault with the basketball grail. In it were the secrets of the late Forrest Allen. It has to do with playing so that others beat themselves. It is a horrible beauty.
It is called winning ugly by those with the knowledge when speaking with the innocent.
It is called winning ugly by those with the knowledge that do not quite yet themselves fully grasp the difference between winning ugly and helping others beat themselves.
But, regardless, it implies the inner most circle of basketball hell and heaven, i.e., knowledge, has been reached.
And therein lies both hoops destruction and salvation.
Your bull whip won't be much use from here on, Indy.
Now you have to make it up entirely as you go.
