@bskeet--first, let me say thanks for teeing up these daily headlines for us. It makes this site quite info rich and one-stop shopping oriented, which I really like. It also gets the linked sights some clicks from us, which maintains our constructive engagement with them.
@jnewell--Disruption, or the lack thereof, is what really separates this year's team defense from prior years IMHO. Your steal stat confirms my bias. :-)
My assessment is that Self has been working on so many things that he has not until now even seriously tried to get the guys playing to win the disruption stat.
Our freshman had to learn how to play help defense; that took a lot of time. Right now, they are kind of staying in front of their men, if their opponent is not too quick, and they are beginning to think about helping a pass away. But NOONE appears to be playing help two passes away yet.
While Self is a great global thinker about what a team's realistic strategic and tactical potential is out in the future, operationally speaking, Self is a pretty methodical guy. He has always tended to put things in a piece, or two, a game before conference starts. He does not seem to have abandoned this approach entirely, but he seems to have evolved to install a piece, or two, each game,while continuing to work on the stuff previously installed. This is why this team looks so frequently caught up in thinking, rather than playing on instinct. The team has very little wired instinctively yet. But it is making progress.
I believe the early season changes in foul calling have really made it difficult for the players to get confident playing pressure defense, generally, and about the time they adjusted to the tight calls, the refs have begun to loosen up some. Your stats highlight Selden and Tharpe as leading the way in disruption deficiency.
While many of your stats this season have surprised me a bit, Selden and Tharpe not stripping surprises me not at all. Their cautious play has stood out like two sore thumbs.
Selden, first: Selden has an NBA body for bodying a defender, and he has a long first step and upper body strength that can take him to the rim offensively, but he is not extraordinarily quick of hand or foot. I am not knocking Wayne here, just stating the obvious. He will develop quickness over the years, but it will take a lot of work.
Tharpe, second: I said this his freshman season. He has short legs. He has to lay off guys to avoid blow-bys. To his credit, he is a bit quicker this season and he has figured out how much he has to lay off to avoid blow-bus, but he still has the Paul Newman/Burt Reynolds Syndrome of long trunk and short legs; that is never going to change. It doesn't hurt him much on offense, because he is quick and dictating where he is going. But defense requires lightening quick reaction, if one is ever going to play up and under longer opponents and hope to occasionally crowd them enough to disrupt them other times when laying back to make a pass look open when it isn't. Tharpe so far has not shown this ability.
Now, in Selden's and Tharpe's defense, they are probably capable of some more disruption than they are showing so far, but Self hasn't got anyone on the roster behind them that can play both under control and aggressively enough to play help defense without breakdowns and protect the ball and feed the post on the other end. As a result, Selden and Tharpe can't really gamble much and take fouls, because Self's got none on the bench that can come in without causing a lot of problems on one end of the floor or the other. Tharpe for one example, HAS to stay in the game to play both PG and 2, so that there is always someone that can feed the bigs.
Selden has obviously been trying to learn to disrupt at D1 speeds, but without much success. He gets fouled up quickly when he tries. And while he is still trying to learn to disrupt, Self has had to force-feed him the art of feeding the post, which has him thinking so much he has started making TOs AND fouling to the point of not being able to disrupt.
And it real crimps Selden's room to grow that there is no one like Brady, or Tyrel, or later Travis or EJ, to come in off the bench and not hurt us, so that Selden can afford to foul and not have to keep playing.
Brannen Greene's slowness at getting under control (really not slow, but just normally it takes time to get under control) is killing the defensive development of Selden AND the team. Brannen needs some mirror time. Brannen may also need some heart to heart with Tyrel Reed. Really, this team does not need his trey gun yet. It will late in the season, but not now. What it needs now is a Brannen Greene that can play under control the way Tyrell and Brady did their sophomore/junior seasons, and the way Travis and EJ did their sophmore/junior seasons. But this is no knock on Brannen either. Brannen is a freshman. Very few freshman can play under control no matter how many minutes of PT you give them. Heck, EJ could not play under control until the very end of his sophomore season. Travis needed a rouge smoking jacket plus two seasons to really lose his wild hair and find out how to play under control.
But KU needs Brannen to do something players of great character and talent and headiness can sometimes do. KU needs Brannen to fugggedabout his natural gift--the trey gun--and start playing under enough control albeit control with more intensity than he has ever had to play with before--to buy Selden the minutes he needs to play a bit more recklessly, when Selden is in the game.
The same can be said of Frank Mason. Mason has tons of talent. He can do all kinds of things this team does not yet need. What this team needs crucially is for Frank Mason to play under control; i.e., not as fast as Frank can play, but just fast enough to keep this team off the dime, plus feed the post without turnovers, and guard--all under control. Were he to be able to do this, then Tharpe could gamble a little more on defense. And in combination with Greene playing under control, Self wouldn't have to resort to Tharpe on a wing so much and Tharpe could really play balls to the walls when he is in and not have to worry about keeping out of foul trouble so much.
M2M defense in basketball is the ultimate expression of team play. Everything, every person, every ability of each person, fits together and so is interconnected. Self likes 7-8 man rotations not because he has an irrational streak that makes him refuse to play more guys. Self knows that you have to play your best 7-8 men late in the season, because that is what your opponents will gravitate toward doing. You can't beat 7-8 better players with 9-10 lesser players once the season reaches the point where the 7-8 guys can play the 200 alloted minutes of a game at a high level. Self's gravitation to 7-8 man rotations is less a choice by him and more an indication of an equilibrium strategy given the five positions, the 200 available minutes, and the NCAA tournament being 3 2-game tournaments with the two games separated by a day of rest. Cut out the day of rest and the equilibrium strategy would probably move to 9-10 man tendency, or at the very least 8-9.
Self has to find a fourth perimeter guy that can get her done both at point and on the wing. Frank Mason and Tharpe are height challenged, but they are the best that Self can come up with--a committee. But what Self really needs is a fifth big with size, so that Tharpe does not have to play wing.
It has to be Brannen, or AW3. AW3 got injured and didn't play through; that's a mark against him. Brannen seemed to be the guy. He was highly rated. He had length. He seemed fast enough. He has some attitude. He has some athleticism. But he's got a wild hair longer longer than Brady and Tyrel had, and almost as long as Travis and EJ had. A rotation player with a wild hair is not a rotation player.
Many board rats have long argued that all you have to do is put a freshman in and play him tell he gets it. This is true of a player without a wild hair. You could put Tyshawn in a limited role and he could do what you asked from his freshman season. You could put Xavier in from his freshman season and he could do it. Brandon Rush and Mario Chalmers could do it. But guys with wild hairs need more than minutes to get it. Their minds--literally their brains--need to grow some more. The average human brain is not fully developed in terms of neural net growth until that person is 23. There are a few that mature earlier and a few that mature later. But 23 is the average.
So: board rats that think all Brannnen Greene needs is more PT are assuming Brannen does NOT have a wild hair; i.e., he does not need any further neural net growth to become a guy that with some PT will develop this season into a rotation guy.
Here is where I defer to Bill Self's knowledge of human brain development and his judgement about what I call "The Wild Hair Factor."
Self has been exceptional at distinguishing between the guys with wild hairs and the guys that just need more PT.
Board rats that argue that EJ just needed more PT as a sophomore obviously don't buy "the wild hair factor," or the inadequately developed neural net development explanation of EJ's development.
But the brain scanning evidence is in. Some guys brains aren't ready to perform at a high level until they are in their 20s, no matter how much teaching and experience you give them. There really are late bloomers, as surely as there are early bloomers.
Self knows that judging who is a late bloomer (someone a lot of PT will not help very much) and who is an early bloomer (someone that a lot of PT will help a lot) is an easy call at the extremes (e.g., EJ as a freshman), but a tough call for a lot of guys in between. Self also know that even though some guys seem clear cut wild hairs (e.g., Anrio Adams), they have so much talent, and a team may have so much need, that Self keeps giving the guy short looks to see if by chance the guy's brain development has occurred ahead of probable expectations.
There is absolutely no question in mine, or any other knowledgeable basketball fan's mind, that Brannen Greene is going to become a heck of a basketball player, maybe even a great one. But his behavior off court and his play in games so far strongly suggests that he may tend toward a wild hair factor. As Self did with Anrio Adams, Self keeps giving Brannen looks and keeps looking for signs that his brain development is far enough along to warrant gambling the team's future on giving him the PT he would need to get enough better to end Self's reliance on Tharpe at the wing. So far Self is not being convinced. But he keeps throwing him the PT bones and hoping Brannen shows the mental maturity needed. This is not about Brannen being a head case, or not trying, or anything else negative. On the contrary, Brannen seems to be giving it everything he has got. He seems to be trying to do everything Self asks. It is about that it is not yet clear he can do what is needed. A look in the mirror and a talk with Tyrel are not punishments, nor criticisms. They are simply small actions that might burn in just enough more nets to make him mature enough. They probably won't work. Just as PT probably won't work. But this team is so critically desperate for what Brannen, or AW3, has to offer, that Self has keep giving them a few minutes, while moving more and more toward Tharpe at wing for reserve.
Would that kids could grow up faster than they do. But the worst thing to do for Brannen Greene, or Andrew White, would be to tell them they are ready for the rigors of the rotation, when in fact they are not. Nothing breaks a player's confidence worse than having a coach become someone whose judgement he cannot trust. A player hate a coach for chewing on him. He can sulk about a coach not believing in him enough to play. But the death blow to a player-coach relationship comes when a coach looks him in the eye and says, "Kid you are ready to play and I am betting the farm on you in the rotation," only to say, "You didn't measure up and I was wrong about you. You are not ready." Players have to be able to trust their coaches judgement of their readiness. Without that trust, they cannot become the best they can be.
And if players cannot become the best that they can be, then teams cannot become the best they can be.
It is no fun to have to tell a player, especially a highly gifted one, that he is not ready in a way that he cannot yet possibly comprehend. Telling a player such things requires a player place an enormous amount of trust in that coach.
Self would much rather be telling Brannen Greene (or AW3) he is ready and playing him 15-20 mpg, so Tharpe never had to catch another pass from Frank Mason.
But the team is more important than Brannen Greene, or AW3, and the player-coach relationship is more important than Brarnnen Greene, or AW3, and their desires to play now.
For this team to play M2M defense and take the disruption battle to its opponents, it desperately needs several players to mature to the point of being rotation players. Hard work and talent and a desire to be team players are irreplaceable elements that can be developed. But adequate neural net development is still a largely uncontrollable variable associated with aging.
Love these boys no matter what. They are trying their butts off at incredibly tender ages. They are entering conference play, where the intensity and violence takes off nonlinearly. The freshmen have no idea what they are getting into. The sophomores are not really sure yet that they can handle what they got a taste of last year.
To too many the OAD rule is just an annoying thing that keeps us from getting to know our players as well as we wish we could, and from watching them for as long as we wish we could.
But for the players, it is a harsh experience that occurs in real time at a too young age, because it makes the most money for the networks, the NBA and the ShoeCos.
The boys matter most.
