MEMO
FROM: Director, jBIA
TO: Most board rats
RE: How to win ugly playing outside-in
Yes, Mr. Self is a genius. He has added, rediscovered, or extrapolated the known tactics of the game of college basketball in the first and second thirds of his career, as much if not more than anyone else in his coaching generation. I won't list them here, because a third of my posting over the years has been pointing them out, trying to figure them out, and just plain scratching my medulla at them.
All persons that innovate later face a risk: they become prisoners of what works, when others catch up by copying. Eventually, they have to re-innovate, if you will. The case in point here involves Self's innovation of THE SHORT TREY offense.
Self did not invent, but refined the concept to a surgical laser degree of fineness, stopping cold shooting trey ballers from shooting BEFORE they missed a lot of shots. He apparently did this, when he figured out, perhaps in part with Danny Manning, the fine points of post play that allowed above average to very good big men to shot 55-60% within 5 feet of the rim AND get a free throw. It was what was called above THE SHORT TREY offense. Stop missing from outside before you miss too many and cram it inside and keep cramming it inside until you gain enough separation to go back to taking a few trey looks to see if your trey shooters will get untracked. If they don't, repeat.
Self kept 40% trifectates on the wings and stopped them from pulling the triggers almost from the second they missed two. Last year it got to where it was if they missed one. Ask Conner and Brannen. Miss two and stop and have the team cram it into the bigs for the short trey, as long as it takes to separate. That was the innovation. Pre-empt the missed trey possessions.
These last five years it got him an 84% W&L Statement. A bunch of titles. And everyone from Jim Calhoun to Rick Barnes, fully half to 2/3s of coaches, began to copy him. Opposing teams began to walk, talk and crawl on their bellies like Bill Self teams, except for the Dribble Drive, apparent Nike Stacks in places like Lexington. Coaches like Buzz Williams and Lon Kruger that were already Okie Ballers, saw their stars ascend. Guys like Billy Gillispie got elite major jobs. KU staffers were hired like genetic engineers that held joint-patents on key parts of the Olivia Wilde genome.
But over this time other coaches and teams have done two things.
They have, as already noted, copied the system as much as possible, at least as much as one can from the outside looking in.
And they have studied endless feeds of how to stop it.
All strategies and tactics have counter strategies and counter tactics. This is the second rule of strategy--the first being you've got to have a strategy.
Which brings us to the present.
We lack the key ingredient to play this inside-out, short-trey way, i.e., the rotation of three dominant bigs that one can cram it down into on the low blocks 10-15 straight possessions for ten minute stretches to break opponents backs and guarranty separation. Further, opposing coaches have also copied our defensive schemes that Self and Danny apparently came up with that let us hold other teams to 35-45% on 2ptas inside, whilst also denying treys. And of course, zebra redirects by some as yet not fully understood Star Chamber have led to foul calling that makes the short trey game oddly more difficult, after initially seeming to favor it.
It is that ability to deny KU a high percentage inside-out game that has caused this team not only to win a bunch of ugly games close, but also to get absolutely beheaded by UK and Temple. And don't forget that Florida beheaded KU the first half and simply self destructed the second half, or we would be talking 10-3.
And so from early on in this remarkable, odd season--this winter of our big man discontennt--it has been the policy of the jBIA (jaybate Basketball Intelligence Agency) to promote that agenda of micro-bursting treys and in some minds blaspheming about shooting >25% treys, preferring 50% treys, and idealizing as a not impossible dream, but admittedly Quixotic dream at this juncture, 100% treys.
To this end, jBIA has been using the usual psy-ops sigint techniques of mind control suggestions and thread jacking, multiple aliasing, appeals to WWII and Marine Corp myth and metaphor, and subliminal graphics like hot pictures of Olivia Wilde as KU Muse with recurring subliminal micro imaging of the phrase "Shoot the Trey/Outside In" at font scales just below consciously perceivable.
Each has been part of a grand psychological operation carried out by special agent @VailHawk and independent three-point and outside-in super patriot @HighEliteMajor and yours truly @jaybate 1.0, the jBIA director equivalent of the teeny little man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz inside the ghastly post apocalyptic head of Zardoz.
jBIA has in this operation gone to the trouble of getting @approxinfinity to deactivate @jaybate 1.0 and turn it into @jaybate 2.0 as a counter basketball terrorism tactic against lowly basketball terrorist types embedded into the KUBuckets.com community for nefarious purposes aimed in part at stealing the bodily fluids of all real KU Jayhawk posters here at KUBuckets.com, but, as my alias often says, it digresseth.
Regardless, we have completed the prospect of psychologically re-engineering the collective consciousness and unconsciousness of the community, and having done so, jBIA next turned to covert insertion of this manufactured psychological consensus of outside-in into the neural nets of that redoubtable Tumble Weed Buddhist, HC Bill Self, and into the collective id/ego/super ego complex that is the team's collective psychology.
This part was very slow going and took a great number of tactical posts and even adoption of some of the advanced mind control techniques alluded to in the George Clooney flick "The Men Who Stare at Goats," based on the book by Jon Ronson, one of many quasi distinguished and perhaps (or perhaps not) intel-embedded discourse framers regarding mind control and conspiracy-mongering working today in contemporary spy-and-informant-riddled mainstream media.
jBIA is of course not at liberty to reveal which techniques were applied but rest assured that you would not be thinking as you are now thinking, had these techniques NOT been applied effectively, and Coach Self would NOT be uncharacteristically letting his team full of indoctrinated inside outers suddenly and non linearly begin playing outside in with none other than The Designer bombing 3s as if from behind the fabled chest of drawers in reputed spook C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. But again, the alias digresseth.
Which brings us to the final step of reengineering minds on the subject of outside-in, mass basketball casualty trifectation.
There will be times in playing outside in, as there are times playing inside out, when nothing goes right; that separation cannot momentarily, or even for extended periods, be achieved, and that some 16% of the time dreaded Ls will be added to the W&L statement. There is no more perfection in mind controlled states than there is in non mind controlled states. Just ask Mark David Chapman.
Controllers of mind controlled states can at best aspire to conditions of similar probabilities of actions and outcomes and can at most devise legends that enable mass distraction when the mind controlled agent goes bat-shizz awry.
Hence, in plain English, there will be times when the treys don't fall.
And it is during these junctures that the most backsliding is to be expected among online subjects and on-floor subjects, and on-bench subjects.
jBIA cannot work miracles. It is a basketball intelligence agency set up by the Dulles Brothers back in the late 1940s that has operated under many acronyms inside and outside government and only lately operates as jBIA. The director, jaybate 1.0 is but the latest in a line of fictional directors based in no small part on Leo G. Carroll's "The Professor" in Ernest Lehman's script of Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest," the fat man's (note: not to be confused with Sidney Greenstreet) rosetta stone for the then soon to emerge post modern witty paranoia trend; which was itself, foreshadowed in Wylie Sypher's rosetta stone for the unspoken end of the American Enlightenment, "The Four Stages of Renaissance Style," which ended with Sypher studying Nicholas Poussain's eerily calm portrayals of post-renaissance twilight and shepherds and flocks oblivious to the meanings of infrastructures left behind by early optimists, later mannerists, and latest baroque-ists of the gone-swelter of creativity and innovation that was the renaissance.
To wit, we seem to find ourselves in the spent phase of the American renaissance, or at the very least the residue of a baroque coda, which began imprecisely in 1776 and collapsed into a post renaissance phase about 9.11.01.
It is in this post renaissance state that the jBIA was surreptitiously appropriated by a small enclave of folks old enough to still recall at least the late stages of the American renaissance, and began the long laborious task of cataloguing the basketball portion of that knowledge of the late renaissance for its storage in an underground vault beneath Allen Field House for eventual reapplication at a future time when the forces of darkness have receded sufficiently for the rekindling of yet another renaissance, as occurs intermittently throughout human and sports histories.
SHOOT THE TREY AND TRANSITION WHEN YOU CAN--this is the inscription above the entrance to the vault where the ark of the James Naismith Covenant is stored and within it is stored not only the grail, but also what knowledge we have to pass on to our posterity.
But as D-jBIA, @jaybate 1.0, I am authorized forthwith to reveal to you the secret of winning ugly outside in.
KEEP SHOOTING THE TREY NO MATTER WHAT UNTIL YOU HAVE ACHIEVED SEPARATION. THEN AND ONLY THEN MOVE IN.
It is a simple algorithm.
Miss ten treys? Shoot 15 more.
Miss 15 treys? Shoot 30 more.
Never, never, never, never, ever, ever, ever EVER stop shooting treys when you are missing.
Only stop shooting treys when you have separated and only then when you are confident the clock and the opposing stretched defense is ready to enable a very high percentage of 2ptas before time runs out in either half.
Basically, the way to win ugly with the trey is the same as the way to win ugly with the inside trey.
STICK WITH THE PLAN.
Just as missing bunnies can only be corrected by continually creating and taking more bunnies, missing treys can only be corrected by creating and taking more treys.
As D-jBIA I am also authorized to reveal one more secret of winning ugly outside-in. It is a prescription of what not to do.
He who thinketh he can playeth outside-in AND inside-out will wind up like the Nazi sipping the water of the Holy Grail in George and Steve's Xcellent Third Indy adventure.
Never feed the Mogwai after midnight and never, never, never, ever, play outside-in and inside-out in one game...EVER.
Your team will incinerate from the inside out.
Rock Chalk!
Note: this memo will self destruct in 60s seconds, Mr. Phelps, and Ethan will cease to be a recurring character, too, and Francis Underwood will inherit the earth, if outside in and inside out are attempted within the two halves of a single game.
