Self is doing it again. He is finding a team, while everyone else is looking for one. Finding is the act of creating a unity greater than the sum of the parts. Looking is the act of fitting pieces together that work the way they are supposed to. Artists find unities. Journeymen search for assemblies. Picasso said he found art, he did not look for it. Bill Self finds teams, he does not look for them.
Every player is a color for Bill Self. A roster is palette of colors. A rotation is the combination of colors he needs to paint a particular game. Each game is a composition. Each season is a new phase in his career.
There are recurring themes and form languages. Stops start offense. Sticking stops offense. Offense is inside out. Feeding bigs is crucial. Kicking out to open looks follows feeding bigs like day follows night. Making shots, not taking shots, is the goal. Shooting for three (a drive to the rim for two and a FT, or a trey, is almost always better than shooting for two. Players that can go get balls (rebounds, 50/50 balls, strips) are better than those that can't. Help is not just help, it is helping the helper help. Beauty may walk a razor's edge, but finding ways to win ugly on your off nights is the path to basketball salvation. Turnovers are resident evil. Getting better is a moral imperative. Playing out of position forces getting better. Not valuing what Self values is the equivalent of sticking your head in the muzzle of a howitzer as the lanyard is pulled. Characters are necessary to keep the drudgery of getting better from making everyone including Self quit from burnout. Being soft is worse than anything but not trying hard. Anyone can be coached up, if they supply the want to.
These are the techniques of the craft of Self's coaching that can be known and articulated. In the hands of journeymen they are used to search for and assemble serviceable teams. But as I said at the start, Self doesn't search for teams, he finds them.
When HEM writes Self has to settle on one of three candidates for Selden's backup he is logically right. When slayr writes Self has to get a PG that is good on the X coordinate he is logically correct. When I say Self ultimately has to stop playing Tharpe and Mason together so much, I am logically correct.
But Self is finding a team, not solving logical problems. Self largely agrees with each of us that in the end our suggestions are where this team will probably end up, but the process of finding a team takes precedence.
Great painters find images lessers don't.
Great coaches find teams lessers wouldn't.
An ordinary coach would build this KU team around Andrew Wiggins. It appeared to many lesser minds at first that Self was doing just that. Certainly the hype artists of national media thought so.
But Self found a great "inside" team with two exceptional perimeter players instead of a Wiggins centered team. Self found a team capable or confronting other teams with a perfect tension between inside and outside. It is taking awhile to develop, but he found it before we did, as usual.
Self isn't searching for his team. He has found it. They are going inside even if opponents do collapse on them. They are going to explode out of position on opponents inside and if that doesn't get three the hard way, then they are going to kick out and crucify them with two athletic freaks on the perimeter making plays.
When Embiid was not so advanced, when Tarick was in a funk, when Jam Tray was not yet confident, it was not clear what team Self would find. But he kept dabbing their pigments on the hardwood canvas in different mixtures until he found the team, until he found a perfect tension. Now he is developing it.
