@HighEliteMajor
Yes, JV was a heckuva guard for KU and good enough to hang around the L for a long time, while getting in the door coaching. Intelligent. With insight. Always a combination if mixed with positive thinking, persistence and problem solving that make for a successful person.
Bad outside shot guards in the game have always fascinated me, because they make unmistakable the other parts of basketball that are pathways to be "impactful" in Self-ese. He could guard. He could disrupt. He had long legs for his size. He had super long arms for his size. He could dribble like nobody's business. He could get to the rim with enough strength to finish and take the beating. He could lead. He could disrupt. He was shifty, wily, and opportunistic in good ways. And he could see the floor.
The only knock I could ever lay on him was like a lot of good guards he had a tendency to over control the ball. It could stick on him. But in his defense, the number of team TOs probably were always lower with the ball in his hands than in anyone else's.
One of the problems with all of us fans judging players to be ball hogs at times is that we are not in the practices to see whether or not the other back court players can protect and move the ball to the right places as well as a player like Vaughn could. As a result, sometimes when I used to say Vaughn controlled the ball too much, I was perhaps not taking into sufficient account the ball handling abilities (or lack there of) of his teammates. A team with weak ball handlers at both wings puts a terrible burden on a point guard. And it tends to create two somewhat misleading impressions. First, it can make a great ball handling PG like Vaughn seem a bit too much of a ball hog, when he keeps it in his hands to hold down TOs. Second, it can make a sound, but not great athlete, like Naa, look less good than he really is.
Despite our recent harsh judgements of Naa, he is a decent, first-starting-season, D1-point guard on the offensive end of the floor that gets heavily schemed against and sometimes overwhelmed, because opponents don't have to worry about Selden, or Wiggins, beating them off the bounce much, because while Selden and Wiggins are driving threats (awesome driving threats in Wiggins' case), they turn the ball over so much on the bounce that Self can't afford to let them drive the ball very much except in crucial create a shot situations.
Hmmm. I'm not sure that came out clearly. What I mean is Selden and Wiggins are beasts to stop in a one possession game, when you put the ball in either of their hands and say go get a basket, because of their massive athleticism's and Wiggins' unprecedented first AND second AND third steps.
But if you put the ball in their hands trip after trip for a whole game you are looking at 6-8 TOs per game from either of them. Wiggins dribbling is especially limited with a defender on him hard. Its not that Wiggins can't get by anyone of god's children on the sacred wood. Its that if he is being guarded hard, his is apt to lose control of the ball, or travel, as he is blowing by the defender. He just needs another year of work to remedy that, but still its a critical weakness in the scheme of playing winning basketball as a team this season. This year, Wigs' and Selden's athleticism's have to be used sparingly to get the net benefit of them, otherwise it turns into the turnover olympics and their play turns in to a net cost.
What this does is put an enormous burden on Tharpe to control the ball and only get it to the guys in situations where they won't cough it up. And, at the same time, Tharpe must also accomplish the conflicting prime directive of Self's hi-lo (aka Dean's and Larry's Carolina Passing Offense as handed down by Henry Iba's hi-lo created for the 1964, or 1968 Olympic Team--I forget which just now) to keep the ball from sticking!
Opposing coaches understand the problem facing Self and Tharpe, and so they scheme to exploit Tharpe's predicament. He's a sound but not hugely athletic PG with playing with wings he can only go to judiciously, if TOs are to be kept from going stratospheric.
Opposing coaches and teams know that Wiggins and Selden are not every possession threats to drive to iron in the KU offense, because they turn the ball over too much doing it. Opposing coaches know that the KU game is to get it to the bigs for the high percentage shot and to hold down TOs by Wigs and Selden until the tipping points of games, when Self unleashes them to do their things. Opposing coaches know they only have to worry about Wigs and Selden going wild on them down the stretches of both halves, or when Self is trying to stop a momentum swing. So: they do the logical thing. They scheme to put Tharpe in a pressure cooker every game. They do it different ways, but always the point is to put Tharpe under the gun, because the wings won't do much damage till the stretches. They dare KU to go to Selden and Wigs every possession, knowing Self won't allow it more than a few trips to try to keep the other team at least a little honest. Tharpe finds himself in a worst of all possible PG worlds.
It is this dynamic that is the Achilles Heel of this KU team. It is why Tharpe's performances vary so widely. If Perry is up against an LSA 4, he is not an every trip option. Selden and Wigs never are, because they cough it up too much. Tharpe suddenly finds him self with no one but Embiid, or Black, to pass to for a threat at the hoop. And unless Naa is at absolutely peak energy, and maximum mental clarity, he simply gets overwhelmed by the scheming against him; then he gets passive as we all do when overwhelmed.
I have been as hard on Tharpe as anyone from the beginning, but I honestly believe that Tharpe would look like a sharply better PG, if he had wings he could go to every time down the floor as threats to put the ball on the deck without turning it over. Other teams would have to play Selden and Wiggins much more honestly and so all of this scheming against Tharpe would go away.
What has happened over the course of the season is that early on Tharpe's wings were just trying to figure it all out and Self was trying to play through them, so Tharpe got passive about being a threat himself. This meant that he was not taking advantage of the defenses that early on were over focused on stopping the reputed phenoms of Selden and Wiggins on the wings. Next, when it became apparent to opponents that Wiggins and Selden could not beat them from 3, they sagged way off them to stop the drive and for awhile only someone with the kind of blazing speed that Frank Mason has could get through the sagging defenses. Tharpe again was made to not look very good. Then opponents figured out that if you just guarded Selden and Wiggins hard, i.e. put your body on them, they would turn it over so much that Self really couldn't afford to play through them because of how many turnovers they would commit. This lead to a period when Tharpe snapped out of passivity, found his trey, found that Embiid was more than just a stick back artist, and began to get in the paint. At that point, though, opposing defenses began to scheme hard on Tharpe and KU's only answer to that for most games has been Embiid. And when Embiid got hurt, that meant that Tharpe was being put under enormous defensive pressure from all sides and his only viable, every-trip counter strategy, Joel Embiid, could not get her done either. Black seemed to be an option, but he fouled too much intermittently and could only get untracked offensively intermittently. Lucas was tried and though he "looked" good as usual, he could not relieve the pressure on Tharpe with Lucas' offensive game in its then current state of development.
On the offensive end, what Tharpe needs most right now is for either Black, or Lucas, or Ellis, or Jam Tray, to become an every trip, every game threat to go 15/10--a viable scoring threat capable of hanging 15 efficiently the way Joel could and getting enough stick backs to keep the opponent from getting brazen about releasing three and running on KU every trip. Its a tall order, but Tharpe needs at least one every trip option. Note: Joel also forces teams to release only two every trip, or get murdered on the glass.
The other possibility is that Self lets it all ride on Selden and Wiggins starting now and hopes they have played enough D1 ball to figure out how to protect, while they are impacting every trip--a game like OSU makes that a scary .
But the good news IMHO is that there AREN'T any other Marcus Smart's with a Markel Brown and a LeBryan Nash out there this year that can put the kind of pressure on KU that OSU did.
I'm not saying Tharpe is a sound guard in every way yet, nor am I saying that Naa is maintaining his mental focus as well as is within his power to do. I am just trying to cut him an amount of slack that he is do given the wings he plays with, who while they have grown defensively, continue to struggle with protection when asked to operate extensively with the ball.
So: while you and I have been proselytizing for some Lucas experimenting, what I think is more likely to happen is that Self is going to stand up in front of the team and say, "Guys, our big man is out for a couple of games and so it is time for great players to make great plays. We're going to shift the scoring load back around to Big Wayne and Andrew. We're going to break down opponents from the wings with ball screens and pick and rolls. We are done with the frontal assaults in the paint until Joel gets back. The big men are now going into stick back mode. They are going to sacrifice their bodies to get to any misses and cram them down the hole. You bigs, the gloves are off. You are free to foul as much and as often as you need to to get to the rebounds. No prisoners. Any misses by Big Wayne and Andrew go back in the hole, or people go down hard trying and take someone with them. Every time Big Wayne and Andrew touch the ball, its war. They are going to attack the rims like Flying Tigers attacking from the sun. They are coming down from on top and they are coming down with full force. Some backboards may get broken. Some rims may get bent the next few games. But the other teams are going to be looking at the soles of Big Wayne's and Andew's adidas coming down on them. You bigs. Everyone of you, and that includes you, Justin, everyone plays every game. We are the University of Kansas Jayhawk Flying Circus from here on out, and maybe after Joel gets back, too. I want to see any adidas on the floor that aren't preparing for take off. I want whatever mistakes are made to be made above the shooting box. Hell, I expect to see hand prints on the top of the back boards. Tarick, I want to see 260 pounds of muscle above the rim casting a giant shadow--coming down on people. Jamari, those shoulders need to be above the rim every trip. We are going vertical, staying vertical and only coming down to go up again, you got that? Because of our footer, we have played on the X-axis. Without him, we are moving to the Y-axis. We're in a dog fight for the next few games and we're going to fight it out above the rim, And you guys are going to put some footprints on the tops of some heads. And we're going to speed our opponents up. Sound like fun? I thought so."
