I razzed Coach Self on the live blog for not raining, dare I say, micro bursting, treys soon enough. But it doesn't matter what I say, because I'm a damned fan and he's a flipping professional coaching genius. Call him Coach Proteus. He doesn't get there to the W the way everyone else might want him to, but damned if he doesn't get there 11 times out of 13, before the conference. And going into this weirdest of all seasons, I would have given anyone a big wet kiss for ensuring me we would be 11-2 right now. Heck, I would have Frenched. :-)
Yes, the UNLV game suggests Self keeps adapting to situations and confounding all of us by some times embracing some or part of what we think he should and taking off in other directions simultaneously. He is the king of both after all.
Self just does play the game on a much higher level than the rest of us, and apparently than most of the other coaches.
Dunphy saw through him, but then that's why he schedules Fran. Magister Ludi needs someone that can expose him.
And thats why he schedules Cal. He knows Cal could never beat him even up on talent, but he knows Cal will never have the same amount of talent Self has. Cal will always have more. And Magister Ludi at the ripe occasionally boring point of middle age, needs the challenge and stimulation of getting his ass handed to him like a pith helmet on his rug once early each season to remind him that he is still not good enough to beat 10 OAD/TADs with three. That give Coach Proteus the get better incentive he needs to drive himself through the looking glass of bothness basketball that is his raison d'etre.
When you coach against him it must seem like you are getting into a game with a pillar of granite that then turns into an amoeba at the most unexpected moments.
This team increasingly reminds me of a science fiction hybrid of a transformer robot and some kind of liquid metal morphing thing.
The team morphed today from running the exact stuff the '08 team ran, to running stuff the team had run previously, to running Fred Hoiberg's offense, to running stuff out of Ben Mac's season, to just running up and down the floor playing grab, to running order breaks to going through periods of just gunning treys every time down the floor to pulling it in tight and doing nothing but driving to the basket the last 3 minutes.
Now I ask you, @REHawk , what other coach and team in America this year, or in the past for that matter, has ever had a team play so many different ways in one game? It is an insane litany of ways to play, in an era when everyone is saying you have to reduce the playbook to See Dick Dribble Drive, or the first ten pages of Self's magnum Hi-Lo opus playbook. And I am just talking about offensive sets and actions and transition. Not defense. God only knows what he was going on at that end. It as all I could do to keep track of the offense. I do plead the mercy of the court for I was encountering some technical difficulties on the net today.
If Self creates a team that can consistently morph through this many kinds of sets and actions and ways of playing--like a flipping burglar working through his various lock picks until he finds the right pick that opens the lock--then anything is possible with this team, even as short as it is.
I wanted to be negative about this win during the game, but the minute Magister Ludi's beads stopped moving, I was flabbergasted at what he had pulled off. It was like the one hit wonders suddenly playing the best of Beethoven. Not that they played particularly well, but that they could pull that many sets off at all was just flipping incredible for the youngest bunch of tin horns Self has ever put in crimson and blue silks and said, "Trust me, guys, this morphing shiz is going to work. You'll see."
I actually thought Self himself got overwhelmed with how many things they were trying. At some point it felt almost like the team took off on him the way LB's team took off from him in the 1988 championship game--where the players kind of left the program awhile, and he just said, okay, let's try that too since its working.
I was kind of critical of Self waiting so long to try to rain the threes the way I have been advocating, but the point is that he blew a team out finally that should have been very tough for this team to blow out.
And that is always the deal with Self.
In the end you are never entirely sure how the hell he did what he did.
I only know that he walked through the looking glass on morphing offensively today.
We have now been some place we have never been with Bill Self before.
It felt bad on the way but it felt good down the stretch.
Its how he is.
Its what he does.
Its all he does.
And he will never ever stop until he finds another ring.
The Coachinator.
Bill Self.
:-)
