@drgnslayr
This is a huge copy and past from jaybate!!!!!!!
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What I loved most about Tarik was that he made everyone better out there, after a period of adjustment. He was a steadying, stabilizing, great bear out there. He was directing people. He was bringing basketball IQ into this team. He was getting the team to run the stuff. It was amazing to watch. Tar just kept running around setting great big man mountain screens, not in a rough way, or mean way, but in a "right way." He just kept being where he was supposed to be in the offense. After I saw his performance, I just knew, slayr, that you were going to on cloud nine about it. Tarik's personality impressed on this team in this game in a way that not only the starters, but the subs, bought into. He became the daddy out there that let the rest of the players run the stuff around him. How many times this season have you said: this team doesn't really run any offense even when it tries to? The offense ran like clock work for nearly ten straight minutes in the second half. I was watching it. It ran so flawlessly I could follow each action unfolding. I know, Tech was not a great team, but the last time we played Tech they disrupted us to the point that we did NOT really "run the stuff." Tar gave me goose bumps a number of times. He was playing the team like a big man plays base violin in a jazz quartet. He would get them moving around him. He would do a quick release and goose the tempo some. He would settle his mass onto the low block and say revolve around my gravity boys. He would signal Jam Tray, Big Daddy is moving out high so they have a little different look, and Jam Tray would catch the signal and move low and wait for the Tar to move the game to him down low through a pass to a wing and wing entry into Jam Tray. It was a thing of beauty what Tar did out there. And he did exactly what he said he was going to do. He was going to use his opportunity to make the team play like a team. Tar was on the glass some. He was in transition some. When things went wrong, he gauged his pace up the floor to be some one to coordinate with on the way. I could almost feel him through the live feed. I felt like if Self had called my number I could have gone down and been one of the planets revolving around the big sun. I know Tar is not as great of an athlete as Joel, but Tar has grown up with the game and knows intuitively how a big man can orchestrate a team. I have not see a KU big man since Cole "BE" the big man that really had the force of physique and personality to "BE" the post. And while Cole did it longer and against better teams, even Cole never did it with the cool, assured control of all the trim and throttle that Tar showed ,when everything was clicking. Darnell Jackson once or twice came close, but he was just not quite the man mountain that Tar is either. It was like watching Charlie Parker laying down the line be bop line and letting the others play around him, with him, then around him, then with him, etc.
It was why I keep watching basketball.
It was the beauty deep in the game that once in a great while gets brought out into the open.
Like Mother Judith said to Tar, "Manifest your destiny."
And he did.
And the team played together like the kind of team I most love to play on and watch.
He reminded me at a times of Willis Reed and there is no higher compliment than that for any that saw Red Holzman's perpetual motion machine he build around Willis in the Garden so many many years ago now.
There are great bears among men. They are rare, but they are there. To have the power of the bear is a great gift. But like all gifts it can not always find the right circumstances to manifest in the fullness of its sweet power.
I have been calling Tar a great bear, a mountain of a man, for awhile because I felt it in him.
But I had no idea if he would ever get to show it with this team so centered on awesome athleticism.
But out of the improbability of a starting five of Niko, Tar, Justin, Wigs, and Selden, there it immersed uncertainly at first, slowly, then more and more, and then first the starters joined the great bear, and then the subs he knows so well joined in, and it just kept building and it built through half time and it crested with the walk ons.
Rack the tape of that game and show it to every big man that ever plays at KU forever afterwards. That is the way a big man is supposed to orchestrate a game. The game is not about him. But he is at the center of everything and at some point he can move around in the center of it all and it is not a controlling thing. It is a gravitational thing. Where he moves the gravity moves and everyone revolves around that gravity and he moves with insight part of the time and on feel part of the time and the players revolving around him sense when he his play calls for staying within the stuff and when it calls for improvising on the stuff and the team becomes truly greater than the sum of the parts.
So help me Phog!!!!!!
