One way to understand Self is to think about how you manage your own budget.
You have a rough idea of what will be coming in and you decide how much you want to spend and how much you want to save. The amount you want to spend determines how you can live. You may want to live a different way, when you get more money coming in, but until then, you have to live the best way you can on what you have coming in and going out.
To some extent, these limits have nothing to do with one's philosophy and preferences.
They are parameters you have to live with for the time being, until you can change them.
Now, how you live within these parameters does have something to do with philosophical and aesthetic and technical preferences and that is where you have some room to make some choices. Some things you like more and are more suited to your legacy style of living. Others you like less and are less suited to it.
Somethings you hang on to, while meeting your budget.
Other things you let go of, while meeting your budget.
In the process of living and making these choices you discover that you made the right choices on somethings and the wrong choices on others.
You discover that somethings you gave up, you really miss and want to get more money coming in so you can include those back in.
You learn things about your self. You learn that somethings you thought were crucial were not. Other things you took for granted you discovered had a whole bunch of significance.
And so on.
This, I believe, is very close to the life and process of a basketball coach moving along season to season in his team operation and during a season.
Self repeats infrequently, but significantly, that he finds certain things that he used to think were important to winning, just weren't. And so he tries to eliminate them from his to do list to leave more time for the important things. Time is what he is really managing.
Other things he appears to find more important than before.
Still other things he did not used to consider as important, he now prioritizes.
John Wooden finally figured out how to win a ring without a single big man on his team in an era when most of the major basketball programs already had two big men in their starting five. Wooden then won a second ring the same way with a significantly different roster. He played the single high post offense with those teams.
But when he got the chance for big men that could score off the blocks, he did not hesitate to sign and tailor his game around them. He won three rings in a row with Jabbar. Then he signed another one: Bill Walton. He won another three rings. He played the single low post offense with these teams.
But what people forget is that next he could not sign another big center that could score back to the basket off the block, even though 6-9 240 Steve Patterson was a load. However, Patterson did have a great 20-23 foot jump shot at the top of the free throw circle. Wooden went back to the single high post offense and attacked on low wings with 6-6 Curtis Rowe and 6-8 Sidney Wicks, while his guards played in tandem out front. It as a 3-2 set with the middle three the high post man.
Then he found Richard Washington and another big, whose name escapes me. I believe he shifted to the high low double post offense, though I am not absolutely certain on that. Whatever, he most certainly went back to a low post with Richard Washington.
These changes in offense are analogous to the changes you make in your own family budget.
You make the changes based on rational net benefit. Some are harder to make than others. Some are actually quite easy to make. You make the changes, because it makes sense to make them.
Some folks hate change.
Others are comfortable with it.
In basketball, some coaches hate changing offense and change defenses every time down the floor.
Some coaches change offenses, and stick with the same defense no matter what.
Some stick with basic schemes on both ends, but vary the formations a lot; that has been Self on offense this season. On defense he has stayed largely with man to man.
Wooden never really had much trouble changing offenses to fit his material.
But he had been very stubborn about his defense. He was committed to man to man defense throughout the 1950s, when he was always coming in second. It was not until Jerry Norman, a former player came back as an assistant and showed him the three quarter court 2-2-1 zone press that he ever even thought about playing zone of any kind. Wooden refused to play zone even with no one over 6-5 on his team at times in the past.
When Norman brought him the idea for the 2-2-1 zone press, Wooden flatly rejected it and told Norman not to waste his time with such nonsense again. But Norman risked his job and approached him again. He basically said that if Wooden wouldn't at least let him experiment with the 2-2-1 zone press on the freshman team, Norman would leave UCLA. Wooden was then struggling to keep assistants because he was on such a small budget. He caved in and said Norman could coach the JV one season with the 2-2-1, as a trial only. No promises about adopting it to the varsity. But as the JV season wore on, Wooden became enthusiastic in his belief in the potential for the 2-2-1. The rest is history.
My point here is that basketball, while a game, is coached and played by human beings that approach the task in pretty much the same way one does other tasks. They don't want to waste time changing, but they WILL change once they see the net benefit of doing so. And they change rather readily once they see the net benefit.
The problem most fans face is that no matter how hard we think in the abstract about these issues of offense and defense, they are actually applied in a real world with real parameters and real variables, real costs, and real benefits. Coaches working every day, years on end, with this stuff, just like business managers, and generals, and orchestra conductors, and heads of research teams, develop a keen understanding of current and historical costs and benefits. They really do know more than we do. And so when our ideas take form, they may increase the benefits, but not hold down the costs enough for net benefit in a large enough incremental increase to justify using them.
I have to think that Bill Self, with a staff of a few experienced assistants, plus a kitchen cabinet of head coach friends he can run things by, and pick things up from, has literally thought of every different way to approach using his talent even BEFORE the season starts. The only things he may not have already considered are the unforeseen things that evolve over the course of the season. One player gets it faster than expected. Another player doesn't get it. One player gets hurt. Another develops way beyond what was expected. And so on. These things Self has to adjust for on the fly. But these are the things that he has a particularly acute insight into in terms of the relationship of costs and benefits of exploiting that most of we fans just cannot have.
This is not to say that we can NEVER be valid, and/or right.
We can be.
But realistically speaking, not often.
More often than not, when we come to an insight before Self does, and he follows us later, I have to think that he got there before we did, and just knew some extenuating circumstances that required waiting, that we did not know.
(I beg your pardon here, for I know I am covering some ground I have covered before earlier this season, but I am trying to say it more clearly and say it within the context of the issue you have raised.)
Basketball is not rocket science, as they say.
We are not talking about trying to explain the difference between a quantum realm and a classical Newtonian one, when we contemplate switching from high low to dribble drive.
On the other hand, basketball does have a good deal of spatial complexity and dynamics of motion and so on that can be tough for laymen, and even some basketball coaches, to get the hang of.
Some basketball coaches do innovate and then other basketball coaches do follow.
Most innovate only infrequently and borrow frequently.
So: what is the point here?
Self was confronted with some unique problems before the season started that you mentioned.
He has later been confronted with an unusual number of unforeseens that interacted with those initial unique problems to produce a complicated risk return matrix for different possible solutions.
Put another way, none of the feasible solutions were both low risk and certain to yield large net benefit.
This is the kind of situation that confuses and sinks all but the most flexible thinkers. Rigid thinkers get trapped in the lesser of evils trap. Flexible thinkers invert some parameters into variables and vice versa. They then find new opportunities and new critical paths that actually turn sows ears into silk purses.
Self, contrary to what many think here, is IMHO an extraordinarily flexible thinker within certain parameters.
What happened this season was that in addition to the usual number of variables he is good at flexibly juggling; i.e., tuning an infinitely variable temperature rheostat, or CVT transmission pulley to find good solutions between the heater core and the car interior, and the engine and the drive wheels, Self was in metaphorical terms also being confronted with problems with the heater core itself, and the engine itself. These were problems with parameters. Problems with parameters get really hairy in a hurry. When working with variables, you are basically working with a closed system with infinite variance with in known limits. But when you have trouble with your parameters, then you have this cascading effect of varying the known limits and the infinite variety where ever the parameters are set temporarily.
Every one can modulate a thermostat to get comfortable in the car and keep driving.
Not many can adjust the fuel injectors, or switch from throttle body injectors to direct injectors, and work with the soft ware and firm ware in the black box that manages the different kinds of injectors, while also fiddling with the rheostat for the heater and jumping into the car and keeping up with fellow drivers you are caravanning with, or racing against.
And if you find that your engine lacks the power you need, because it is missing one entire piston (Embiid), it presents a real problem of moving from trouble shooter to real mechanic needing to swap engines, or at least engine components in and out and retune the whole vehicle until it works effectively again.
And I would argue that when Self not only lost Embiid, his parametric rim protector, and found he did not have anyone on his team that could play back to the basket, or rim protect, or rebound, he suddenly found himself confronted with not one but four broken parameters: rim protection, post guarding, back to basket scoring, and rebounding. Switching to three point shooting, which he did for awhile, could only fix the scoring and only then with intermittent slumps that would require another way to score, or result in losses.
Once you get into fixing parameters, you are basically into model building, which is design and engineering new solutions, followed by re-fabrication, re-assembly, fine tuning, and re testing.
That is VERY complicated work even in a simple game like basketball. Human beings are not as predictable as rods, main bearings, valves and radiators. And their brains have as many (way more actually) bugs as black boxes with firmware and software.
Avoiding fixing parameters is why coaches invest soooooo heavily in recruiting the right players that ensure the parameters are in place.
Self had done everything he could on the recruiting end, and was left with broken parameters that needed redesigning in the process of a season unfolding. It was a hairy situation.
I don't believe he has really faced it to this extent in his entire KU tenure.
To avoid redesigning parameters, he invested heavily in trying to train our small bigs to be back to the basket scorers early. He tried long after fans had given up. It is easy to say change the parameters, when you don't really have to figure out the foreseeable headaches and unforeseeable ones that go with making the changes.
Self understood from the beginning how tough this was going to be. He understood that it made sense to TRY to teach the small bigs to play back to basket, if at all possible, and no matter how messed up things appeared while trying. It was a reasonable bet to try. I've frankly never seen guys that couldn't learn some b2b moves. But finally Self had to admit that the clock was running and none of his guys could learn fast enough.
So he did what is called inverting the problem. If you can't teach them to attack back to the basket on the blocks, then maybe you can have them attack the blocks face to basket from various spots and score inside that way. None of them could do that at first either, but all of them except Landen proved able to learn to do it in only a few games.
But of course that meant trying to teach the perimeter players a new way of playing on the perimeter with short bigs charging the blocks.
And so the cascade of problems with redesigning started.
And they kept cascading through out the season as players got injured, and players healed, and players got suspended, and players hit walls and so on.
Some how, Bill Self pulled it off. I doubt he is entirely sure exactly how he did it all, but he had a redesigned plan and he just kept banging on it and tweaking it and adjusting the rheostats and CVT pulleys until his team finally began to not only do what he was asking, but slowly started to "see" what the plan was, and then "see" how to bring not only their own technical mastery of it, but their own creative contribution to its possibilities.
Notice that Frank Mason is increasingly playing as he did last season, when that was clearly not working. The difference is that he can play completely under control within the BAD BALL scheme, and then have the insight about when to use his incredible after burners in the spread and drive it scheme to dazzle defenders and leave them like they were standing still. But he doen't do it all the time, and when he does it, it fits into the BAD BALL scheme, in a way he could never fit it into last seasons GOOD BALL scheme.
Whereas the 2012 season was a clinic in how to make do with 5 fine experienced players that fit all the parameters and variables and one very limited player who could fit some, but without any other depth, this season is a clinic in how to redesign a young and inexperienced team on the fly when you lack 4 basic parameters related to the inside game, despite having a lot of good athletes, and a lot of good basketball players on the perimeter.
I think the 2012 season was his greatest coaching job until this season.
This season took much greater virtuosity in coaching.
The 2008 season was a great job, because he won the ring, but most of the work had been done the previous three seasons and the 2008 season was a matter of fine tuning and maintaining an already well designed and debugged team. His biggest challenge that season was operating the team so that he could plug Rush in without a hickup when Rush was finally able to play 100 percent.
This season I am very confident that all his colleagues around the conference, and probably around the country, are just shaking their head in awe at what he has done.
Its like if Stradivarius could not only build a great fiddle, but play it superbly to, and build it and play it at the same time during 35 orchestral performances!
It is quite amazing.
And while he will have grown a lot as a coach and be a better coach in coming seasons because of this season, I don't know if he will ever be able to do a more virtuosic performance for two reasons.
One, I think the stresses of this kind of season are so great that a coach might only be able to pull it off once in a career. I really think that Self has willed most of this season to happen by an absolutely Herculean focus of all his abilities and energies and concentration. At some point a coach in middle age can't have the energy to do that any more.
Two, I think the trauma of this endeavor will drive him to either find a way never to get caught in this sort of personnel crisis at KU, or move to another coaching situation where it can be avoided. If Self decides that he cannot recruit the basic pieces he needs year in and year out at a high pressure place like Kansas, then he may decide that it is not logical to stay at a place like Kansas, which expects him to do that. He may decide he needs a different school that lacks those expectations, or a school that has the kinds of recruiting linkages that enable fulfillment of such expectations, or he needs to move on to a new challenge in the pros.
Self appears to me to have given more to the University of Kansas basketball program this season than in any TWO seasons in the past. He is not a kid anymore. I don't frankly know how he did it this season, having been that age once myself. I am in awe of his energy and competitive fire, not just his glass bead game brilliance at the strategies and tactics of basketball design and engineering, testing and development, on the fly.
I don't care if Bill Self gets 10 OAD/TADs on his roster next season, so much as that he just gets the parameters and variables--the basic pieces--of a basketball team signed. I don't want Self to have go through what he has gone through this season again. It is not good for him. It is not good for us. It is not good for KU basketball. I want him to be entering his gravy years, where he can at least start each season with all the pieces of a team that he needs. I know he is trying his butt off. I know he has always had a reputation as a great recruiter and he has brought in a lot of great players in his tenure. Something other than Self seems to be standing between him and his gravy years right now. I would like to see that obstacle removed, so he can get on with getting the players he needs to win the considerable number of rings he appears capable of winning. And I would like KU's administrators to lead, follow, or get out of the way regarding removing those obstructions for Coach Self ASAP.
Whether they do or don't though, he is going to be a better coach after this season, because of the enormous amount of learning he has undergone in trying to fix the parameters and redesign the team on the fly. And that's bad news for the other Big 12 coaches.
Rock Chalk!
