Bragg doesn't know BAD
jaybate 1.0
10346 posts
Bad Ball! Is so beautiful when nothing else works!!!
Wayne Tinkle is going to make OSU a force in a few years!
Bad Ball to the rescue!!!!
If he retains his incredible foot work at this weight and strength, he will singlehandedly end Golden States pioneering new way to play the game. He looks insanely powerful in the picture, like he could have dunked on Wilt!
Go, Joel, go!!!!
PHOF!
It is XTRemely sad and complicated what happened to Indiana. It is much, much, MUCH more complicated than Knight having a temper. Knight had a temper alright. He had it for years before they decided to sack him. Knight took on the powers that were (and probably still be). Knight tried to take on corruption and wound up in exile never to win another championship. Coach K would still be chasing his mentor, if Knight had gone along to get along. Not saying Knight was an angel. Not saying I would have wanted my kid to play for him. Saying whatever his faults and flaws, he was the last guy to try to take on corruption in the game before it apparently became institutionalized and normalized, and he was CRUSHED.
For anyone that wants to understand what happened to college basketball, Bob Knight was the canary in the mine shaft that needs to be studied.
He stood up alone.
And the wrong way guys won.
And the game has never been the same since.
If Vick has PG potential, yes. I like long point guards. But I have had the impression that he is not a great ball handler and distributor.
I think the plan was Svi at 3 backing up Wayne, and Brannen at 2 backing up which ever one of Frank/Devonte needed a blow.
Probably Self viewed the time that Brannen and Svi came in as times for them to be on the wings with a single point guard out front running the high low passing offense.
But Self suspended Brannen and Svi has been volatile shooting--way hot, or way cold, so Self has had to ride it out with Frank and Devonte playing extra minutes.
My guess is things will settle down with Brannen back. Probably what happened was that when Self suspended Brannen, Svi began to have to learn two positions and got a little overloaded. It doesn't seem like much, because it is just one wing, or the other on offense. But on defense, it IS a big deal having to prepare for two positions. It meant Svi had to prepare to guard four guys, instead of two, which would be normal. Normally you prepare for the starter and his backup. Svi had to start preparing for two starters and two back ups. Its a lot more game video to watch and a lot more to remember.
Also, preparing for two wing positions in Self defense means learning two different menus of help rules. One wing tends to help with with one post man and the other wing tends to help with the other post man.
Further, it means remembering to funnel to the center in opposite directions on defense.
It may not seem like much to an experienced player, but to a guy still finding his way, like Svi, it could be a jump. And when you start having to think a lot out on the floor, all the things you do best without thinking, like shooting, and reacting on rebounds, and getting the jump on funneling someone, well, those things can suffer.
The point of this digression is also that not only might things settle down for Brannen and Svi, but because everyone will be back to learning one position for each game, it may mean that Vick only has to be asked to learn one position, and so Self can more confidently slip him into some minutes without Vick thinking too much.
@KUSTEVE said:
Dook ran the perimeter offense for 9 consecutive years w/o a Final Four, including two straight first round NCAA losses.
I think you have just nailed the reason Self has refused to walk down this path so far.
But man tried to fly for a long damned time, before he finally got it right. Now look at how many planes there are. :-)
We don't fly everywhere we go.
But we sure as hell do when there is a long trip to take.
If we're not John Madden.
I don't know where this is heading.
Golden State is proving something.
It remains to be seen exactly what Golden State is proving however.
Is it just about trey balling.
Or is it about some synergy between trey balling and having a player play the way Draymond Green plays?
But something is going on with trey balling.
Everyone that has ever studied statistics has said from the minute the three point line was added that sooner or later trey balling had to dominate the game. The problem was, like all weapons, it took many iterations of trying to learn to use it most effectively for it to become dominant.
There have been a lot of false starts with trey usage.
But we finally seem to be closing in on something.
I may not live to see the day when every first shot of every possession will be a trey, but I want you to know that we as a three point shooting people will get to the promised land.
All signs of logic and statistics point to the first shot of EVERY possession being a trey.
All signs of logic and statistics point to the second and third shots being treys, too, unless one is defending a lead with twos down the stretch of a game.
When it will come, I cannot say.
But unless war for control of the Eurasian Center Point and who builds and controls the trans Eurasian super corridor leads to global catastrophe ending basketball as we know it by weapons of mass destruction, or a designer virus gets loose we cannot adapt to, the day is coming when trey balling reigns.
Could Rico Gathers become Draymond on steroids?
Probably Scottie won't seize the moment.
But Rico seems to me to be a guy that has the athleticism to be taught to put the ball on the deck more and to pass more.
Where I am headed with this is not so much about Gathers specifically, as about the potential future of the Point Center.
As NBA bigs get smaller, just as Draymond begins to be a jack of all trades, there becomes the possibility of every position becoming much more widely scoped.
Everyone said that Danny could have played point guard about as well as Magic; that he had an even better touch Magic.
Magic was essentially the proto type of the point center.
Danny could have been the next one.
I suspect if we go back we could find some more that had the athleticism and abilities to become a point center.
Wilt absolutely could have become a point center. He would never have bulked up to 300. He would have played at about 260. He proved one the course of his career he could learn to do almost anything except FTs. Bad FT shooting might have kept him from being the Point Center, but I suspect he would have found a way around it if that were the only way to be the greatest player in the alternative age of the point center.
The game then was not ripe for it. The 7 footer was too important inside, based on the way the game was called in those days.
Now?
Draymond may just be the beginning, not the outlier.
My father always said that Jud could have used Magic more as a point center than a tall point guard, but that Jud and most people weren't flexible enough thinkers to realize the potential of a point center. He swore the game would evolve to the point center one day. He said it would be a lot like Hartman's use of Walt Frazier at SIU. He said Danny could have changed the game and been that guy for Hartman, but that LB, as great of a coach as he was, was just not secure and stable enough career wise to do anything but try to win a ring with Danny the surest way possible.
Maybe the unintended consequence of the spread of trey balling as primary offense, will be come the point center my dad forecasted.
The idea of the point center is for the offense to start out revolving around a guy out front capable of doing what a point guard can do, but combined with what a center putting it on the deck could do. Its not just running an offense with a long point guard.
Centers are hubs.
McClendon's four corner offense, that Dean adapted from just a stall, into both a stall AND a scoring offense, makes the concept clear.
In the four corner, the point guard becomes a short center that can put it on the deck and keep it on the deck and stay the hub of action, where ever he moves on the floor.
Using point guards in this role was the only feasible way in Dean's time. But the best big defensive guard (think Don Chaney) could always conceptually at least stifle the best short point guard (think Phil Ford) in the four corners.
My father argued correctly that the best point center would always hold matchup advantage with the opponent's best defender, be he center, forward, or guard.
My father could not foresee big men getting shorter, so he was always envisioning the next Wilt Chamberlain that was coached from the cribbed to be such a point center.
But reality has a way of morphing around unexpectedly and delivering us to what we were anticipating, only by a different context enabling a slightly different kind of actor than expected.
The rules and dynamics shaping the game have changed to create a context where bigs are getting smaller.
The smaller the bigs get, the more feasible it is to find a point center that can do all the necessary things. Its just a numbers game on a normal distribution.
A capable point center is increasingly probable and that rising probability increases the feasibility of building such a team. What we may be seeing in Golden State is not so much the evolution of a three point shooting team, but the rise of the point forward in the NBA.
And that point forward may be a pointer toward the point center, once the NBA gets comfortable with the changes created by the point forward.
I keep telling everyone: Magister Ludi would have loved this game.
Thanks for calling our attentions to Green more specifically. I've been hearing some about him, but its always good for some one that cares and knows something to call my attention to it.
It makes sense that a guy like Green would be an unintended consequence of the NBA's migration to more trey ball shooters and to shorter and more mobile bigs.
Draymond Greene would not fair well against Wilt Chamberlain, or Kareem Jabbar, would he? Wilt would score a 100 on him, grab 50 rebounds and hold him to no rebounds. Jabbar would score 65 and would come out +20 on rebounds. Those kinds of numbers would off set all the net benefits of the versatility Greene brings.
But in a three point era where there aren't many super centers, and the structural statistical advantage of three point shooting is finally being recognized, and height variation is lessening, a guy like Greene can do in the NBA, what Brandon Rush did for KU in D1: EVERYTHING.
In essence, the NBA is becoming more like D1 in some physical respects, as D1 is migrating to be more like the NBA. Convergence, baby, its fantastic!!!!
P.S.: One more thing--Green suggests that Nike Tom Izzo is not getting by without talent. Nike Tom is just like Self--ahead of most on coaches what kind of talent is becoming most important to hanging Ws.
Glad you brought this point up. From the moment this two guard offense with Frank and Devonte surfaced, I thought it was a bad idea, because we didn't appear to have a third point guard to rotate for them.
Self apparently decided that the team would have to change character after the 5 minute substitution regardless, because of the wide variety of big men he has to play, so he apparently decided it was okay to start Frank and Devonte and shift gears with Svi/Greene/Vick and become a one guard offense for periods of time.
The problem of course is what if an injury hits Frank, or Devonte? If a team is schemed to rely on the separation that playing Frank AND Devonte can give it, then what does it do, if one of those two go down?
I don't recall Self taking this big of a gamble at two positions before. Its a big one and says volumes about just how limited he thinks Wayne, Svi, Greene and Vick are in the ball handling and defending department at the 2, and about how unready he thinks Svi, Greene and Vick would be for the 3. Self has essentially decided 30 minutes per game of Frank and Jamari is more important to hanging Ws than holding down wear and tear on the two guys over 40 games.
So, the answer to your question of whether there is another point guard is: no, unless Vick is hiding something from us with a role scoped in a way that obscures his point guard potential.
Svi was the only other option. But when they decided to beef Svi up, that was the end of Svi the point guard.
If I were a coach like Greg Marshall, which I mercifully am not, I would definitely be looking at Fred Van Vleet having some XTReme Accidental Contact with Frank, or Devonte that refs would not call, and that would lead one or the other to the locker room, and to being woozy for the rest of the game.
Yes, I really clouded things up there. Sorry about the vagary. I get an auto-:-1:
Composite 3 referred to a three man 5 position.
(Hunter, Carlton, Cheick)
Composite 5 referred to a five man 5 position.
(Hunter, Carlton, Cheick, Landen, and "__" aka Jamari. :-)
Should have called it something else for sure.
Composite 5.5
Composite 5.3
@wrwlumpy said:
Pursuing whatever Coach Self decides is in the best interests of the team would be enhanced by a healthy Perry.
The more weapons coach has, the more dangerous an opponent he can craft his team into being.
Hence, my prayer to the basketball gods for Perry's health.
KU deserves a break on this injury stuff.
I am reminded of George C. Scott as Patton. From vague recollection...
Patton: Chaplain, its bad enough we have to fight the Germans. We shouldn't have to fight this inclement weather, also. I want you to write me a weather prayer.
Chaplain: General, I'm not sure how that would be viewed by god.
Patton: Don't you worry, chaplain. I'm in good with the almighty. Just write me that weather prayer.
We need a chaplain over the KU Divinity School, or Department of Religious studies, to come down to center court Allen Field House sometime when the place is empty, and pray an INJURY PRAYER. This is not just about saving one's soul. This is about the Father of All Basketball programs at a decisive historical moment.
Heavenly father, I beseech thee, give us the health we need to smite thine enemies on the sacred wood that you have given us, so that we might be able to achieve everlasting victories in service to your greater glory. Amen.
Don't know how it occurred.
But I am beginning to see a pattern in the lingerie the team wears. Whenever one guys has to wear it for an injury, several guys wear it. Maybe Self thinks it makes it harder to "kill a cripple" as football coaches used to say in their politically incorrect ways, when telling players to attack the players playing injured as weak links.
The way cheap shotting and XTRem Muscle are enabled in today's game, I reckon I would want to offer my guys such camouflage, too.
Interesting. What changed after 1988 to stop those peaks?
Thanks for getting us those numbers.
I stand corrected.
50.8% for a right tail tops is something I can live with.
It's rare, but possible.
Other right tail highs nesting near it suggest 52-60% are beyond probable hope, unless something has changed that is not yet apparent.
I do expect we should see that right tail high edge up some, if teams stack up with more Trey ballers.
But 55-60 would require quite a sea change, or one huge rare anomaly.
Agreed, but I just talked to a young father who said his 10 year old son's friends generation of kids are showing a marked increased interest in football, and a decline in soccer. Every generation can surprise.
I think you are a board rat, like me, trying to understand the greatest game ever invented and advocating what he thinks is best for his beloved Jayhawks.
Self shares some important characteristics in the depth of his apparent thinking with Wooden and seems the only coach that might have a chance in this generation of going on such a run.
But they are, at the same time, quite different, as you rightly note.
Wooden was also quite different from Allen.
Difference should not surprise.
Cat-skinning has many paths.
Thought, as Borges said, is a labyrinth.
Action finds critical path, or loses.
You want Self to approach the game more like Wooden and suspect he is.
I think greatness hews its own path, but passes through similar phases of life that evidence bends in trajectory fitting that phase.
Self seems at one of those phases that Wooden came to and that Coach K and Roy came to..
This we agree on.
The nature of the bend is taking shape before us.
I think Wooden is helpful as an indicator that such bends come at such phases of a career and involve a coach taking another decisive step forward in the way he plays the game..
I do not think the bend will be as similar to Wooden's in terms of technical solution, as you appear to.
But Self appears to have stepped to the plate to try to make the next bend.
It's at once momentous AND just another bend.
It depends on how it turns out.
Svi is effectively a second year freshman chronologically. If he can get his shooting resolved there is a ton. Of PO There.
But Greene is the real deal as a gunner.
Modern neuroscience research supports the early preference for ending football.
The Wizard may seem simple to you, but there was nothing too insignificant for him to systematize. The pyramid was maticulously constructed. Every spot on the floor was studied statistically for the best places to shoot. Every player was assigned spots where he was and was not allowed to shoot. Banking vs. swishing was studied. They were taught how to ties shoes and wear their socks. How to fill lanes was studied. Timing and length of outlet passes was studied. He studied the game statistically for at least 20 years. He studied whether straight or curved cuts were most effective. What people saw in his championship run was the distillation of 20 years of research.
KSU on the heals of UK?
Self will likely downplay the UK game.
Avoiding an upset by KSU is much more important to the hunt for a 1 seed than beating UK, though he would dearly love some payback.
@DoubleDD said:
Is it really that impossible to think that a team can shoot 50-60% trey?
Season average? Yes.
Still too early for me to have a hunch. This team looks really good right now, but more experienced teams always look good early. .
Three things cloud my crystal.
Perry's injury.
Wayne' s inconsistent focus.
The unprecedentedness of a 5-man Composite 5.
What gives me the most hope for this team?
Brannen Greene. I think he has high seriousness now. THE CHANGE has happened. He could be THE ONE. If the hip holds up, he could become The BAR man in this platoon. I feel Brannen is the guy on the team with the confidence it takes to go all the way. He has a huge will like Brandon and Travis had. If he has discovered the warrior's centeredness, the team can have a hub and the killer instinct. He alone can settle Wayne down. Snipers are loners. BAR men are at the center of the platoon. BAR stands for Browning Automatic Rifle. Brannen through a strange process likely orchestrated by Bill Self, now finds himself the center of something bigger than himself.
Self is a wily devil who knows what every team needs and is willing to go to the wall to get it.
P.S.: I am taking Frank's emerging greatness for granted.
How do you say 636 Ws and .632 W&L without ever having coached at an elite school.
Ralph Miller was the guy that should have been given the KU job after Harp flopped, instead of Owens. Miller was one of the great coaches of his generation. He was an absolute man. He was a proponent of fast break basketball. Had he coached KU, instead of Owens, KU would have never sagged in national respect as happened. Miller got caught in the Wichita/Kansas City power struggle for replacing Harp. The Wichita faction wanted Miller. The Kansas City faction wanted Dean Smith. And they compromised on Owens, at least that 's how it was told to me by old timers when I was a boy. His WSU team with Dave Stallworth and Nate Bowman was a fabulous team.
He was one of KU's greatest athletes of the 1930s. His wiki summarizes his KU and high school career well.
"In college at the University of Kansas, he won three letters as a football quarterback and three in basketball. He set the state record in the low hurdles in 1937. He was all-state three consecutive years in football and basketball. By 1940, he was beating the 1932 gold medalist in the decathlon Jim Baush in seven of 10 events."
Miller was a gruff, no BS kind of guy--a stud. Let me put this guy in perspective. Had Bob Knight come into Corvallis and thrown a chair, Miller would have grabbed him and slapped him around. Miller left WSU for Iowa and built a good team almost instantly there, too, then bailed and went to Oregon State because he liked the Big Country and the Big Water--an outdoorsy type. The guy was just a MAN. At Oregon State he had many good teams, but the touchy feely era of sports on the west coast started and he was out of step with the times that way. Not smooth. Didn't try to be smooth.
He is a fair sized legend in Corvallis--the court bears his name. I visited there about ten years ago and talked ball in a coffee shop with a Beaver fan. He didn't hesitate. The old guy had watched the great Slats Gill, Pete Newell, and Sam Berry, and Wooden. He said that on the bench Miller was as good as any of them, probably better. But he never had enough top talent to go deep. He said Miller's best OSU teams never had more than two really good players on each team that could play for UCLA, or the big schools back east like UNC, Kentucky, Kansas and Indiana. He said Miller was too honest. And he could have coached Knight's 76 team to an undefeated season in his sleep. I liked this old dude. The minute I knew he knew about Slats Gill, I knew I had a live one on my hands. He said Miller had come to OSU with the reputation of an offensive coach that liked to run, but that at OSU he realized he wouldn't be able to get enough talent to run with the top teams in the country, so he slowed it down and played defense and ball control. I kick myself for not asking him about the offense Miller ran.
Miller to me represents the real missing link between Phog Allen and the modern game. Once Harp lost his nerve, and found god, and devoted himself to FCA, that left Miller and Dean Smith as the links in the modern day to the Allen tradition of ball. But Smith systematically distanced himself from Allen by embracing first the Oklahoma Shuffle and then Iba's high low passing offense. Smith talked about lots of Allen principles and drills in how they practiced, but Smith really coached a brand of ball, not very closely connected to Allen at all. Smith's game was 1/3 Oklahoma Shuffle, 1/3 Iba High Low, and 1/3 McGuire Ball.
I saw an interview with Miller once when he was being inducted into a HOF, or was sponsoring someone into a HOF. All I remember is that he said Allen and Iba were the two great influences on his thinking about the game. He was Bill Self before there was Bill Self, maybe.
Miller is also remembered for having had the audacity to have said that he could go out and find a guy 6-8 out on the street that had never played organized basketball and with coaching turn him into a credible back up big man in D1 college basketball. Remember, this was at a time when everyone had seen Wooden embrace athleticism and everyone thought guys had to be Y-axis guys, or footers, to play the game in college ball. Uh, yeah, the guy had a pair and didn't care when he was in step with the times, and then didn't care when he was out of step with them.
According to my late father, who was at KU when Miller was a BMOC in football and playing basketball for Allen and taking classes from Naismith, but who never assisted Allen, Miller was a fabulous athlete, and Miller's brand of ball was the logical extension of Allen. Allen was protean and willing to constantly try radical new things. Miller was protean and willing to coach a running game one period of years, jump into the Big Ten and set an offensive scoring per game season record, then completely shift gears to a slow down game at OSU. This was the sort of flexibility that characterized Allen, also.
My pop said he had heard that Miller was somewhat embittered that he was turned down by KU a couple times and that he really had little use for KU by the time he was in mid life. His loyalty was all with Allen and Naismith, the men, and not with the KU survived them. He seemed to feel that KU after Allen and Naismith had pretty much shafted him. I have always wanted to hear from someone that really knew the story from Miller as to what happened.
Miller is in my pantheon of great basketball coaches.
Miller is the one that KU squandered.
Imagine KU laboring through Harp and Owens and having spurned a future Hall of Famer--Ralph Miller. Only a school with such a giant basketball coaching legacy could even be in position to make such a stupefying miscalculation.
All through my childhood of Harp and Owens, my father said that anyone of three guys should have been the KU coach: Ralph Miller, Dean Smith, or Eddie Sutton. Smith never wanted the KU job after he got to UNC. Sutton no one at KU would consider because he was an Iba guy and there were still too many KU alums and fans that remembered the bad blood between Allen and Iba over Allen thinking that Iba's slow down game was ruining basketball. Ralph Miller, he said a thousand times, was THE ONE. Miller was the right guy--the real connection to Allen--the guy with the brashness and balls and vision that Allen had. But Miller was to socially and politically unpolished and too opposed by the Kansas City faction for reasons he never explained, but which had to have had something to do with the Ray Evans-Dean Smith faction in Kansas City.
But this is all rumor, speculation and hearsay, and what we need is for someone that knew someone that knew Ralph Miller to come forward for the legacy and clarify what really happened--to explain how KU missed out on not one but two Hall of Fame coaches--Ralph and Dean--that should have been taking KU to the promised land all those years between Allen and LB.
Rock Chalk!
Conner, its not too late to transfer again.
Run, run, run!!!!!
Save yourself.
Marsha is goat footed and has 666 tattooed in invisible ink on his forehead!!!!!!
:fearful:
You took the kool aid.
It takes about 12 more hours and another game for it to wear off.
Now, I am going to talk you down off the ledge.
Repeat after me: "Even though I can see sounds and hear colors, no team in the history of basketball has averaged 50-60% from trey. God is my co-pilot, not the kool aid."
:grinning:
Composite 5 will play everyone but Gathers to +0/+0, or +2/+5. He could come up -5/-3 on Rico.
Frank will plus +3 to +5 his man.
Devonte continuing to take the consistency pill will +0 to +5 all he faces.
Selden is a HUGE question mark. When focused, he always creates +0 to +7. But his unfocused nights Wayne gets blown completely out of the water, and goes -10/-4 plus a wad of turnovers.
Perry? His injury is really worrisome. I was hoping he was just in one of his inner world trips vs. Harvard, but while he had a little more edge vs. Holy Cross, he was really at the same level with a leeeeeetle more effort. The guy is crucial to the team, because he has always been the compensating factor for Wayne's roller coaster game. Since Perry found himself last season, Perry has been the only guy that could get big enough plusses to offset one of Wayne's intermittent anti-games. Without Perry, Self is just going to have put a saddle on Frank and squeeze him for 21-25 every game. I don't know how long Frank can do it.
Thus, without putting too fine a point on it, Composite 5 becomes THE man on this team. Composite 5 is the only guy with enough up side in Bragg and Diallo to go with the finished foundations and low ceilings of Traylor, Lucas and Mick, to expect significantly rising productivity come B12 time. Composite 5 is the only one on the team capable of generating the double doubles night in and night out that a title and ring challenging team has to have. Frank can get you the points, but even Frank can't rebound in double figures night in and night out. With Perry injured, Composite 5 is DA ONLY MAN that can keep opponents from doubling and trapping Frank into exhaustion.
So long as Perry is injured (operable?) and playing 3/4 speed (i.e., 4-7 rpg and 12-14 ppg, instead of 20/10), this team has just gone through a paradigm shift. And its a paradigm shift that is going to infuriate board rats living in the parallel universe where KU can average 45-60% percent from trey for a season. What we are looking at.....drum roll please....is a down the middle team. OMG! OMG! OMG! I said it.
We are looking at a team like Sherron (=Frank) and Cole (=Composite 5) and kicks to the wings. instead of Brady and Tyrel and whomever, we are talking Devonte, Brannen and Svi as the kick outs.
Hubba, hubba, hubba, here comes the passing offense again.
OMG! OMG!! OMG!!!!!
Down the middle basketball!
The dreams of 4 out 1 in and the quick trigger offense could be stillborn, atomizing like paradise lost in Milton.
When the Blue Meanies start appearing on the schedule, its going to get very rough and they aren't going to give KU the running game. They are going to create bogs for KU to grind in.
"Where have all the fast breaks gone,
Long time passing?
Where have all the fast breaks gone,
Long time ago?
Where have all the quick treys gone?
Gone to reversals one by one
Where have all the quick treys gone?
Gone inside out
And in again...."
OMG!!!!!!
Please, basketball god, let Perry not be operable.
Let Perry Ellis be healthy again.
Let Perry Ellis save us from a down the middle grind team, with a bunch of kick outs to BG, Svi and whomever.
PUHLEASE, LET THE DESIGNER BE OKAY!!!!!!!!!!
I can't take a season of fan despair at having quick trigger trey ball dashed from their hopes and dreams.
Mourning becomes Elektra...NOT ME!!!!!
Please Jocasta, not down the middle!!!!
Don't make me put my eyes out with the broach!!!!!
"You're next ! You're Next! You're next!"--Kevin McCarthy, Invasion of the Body Snatchers
The anecdotal cases prompt me to these additional hypotheses.
Hypothesis 1: Against the lesser teams, Self doesn't rely nearly as heavily on his foundation players, and instead tries to develop his lesser starters by playing through them more.
Hypothesis 2: Lesser teams have to pick which poison to let kill them, and opposing coaches decide if they can't win the game at least they will try to shut down a star (not entirely rational basketball strategy, but rather subjective value driven).
Regarding Hypothesis No. 2, I recall reading about the head coach of Sienna, Jim Patsos, who used to be the head coach at Loyola Maryland, before G.G. Smith. On his wiki page, there is a fascinatingly frank quote by him about why his then Loyola team double teamed Davidson's Stephen Curry all over the floor and despite being beaten by 30 points.
"On November 25, 2008, Patsos and the Greyhounds double-teamed Davidson All-American Stephen Curry for the entire game, leaving his other three players to face the 24th ranked Wildcats in a four on three game. Davidson won by 30, while Curry stood in the corner during most possessions. Commenting afterwords, Patsos said: "We had to play against an NBA player tonight. Anybody else ever hold him scoreless? I'm a history major. They're going to remember that we held him scoreless or we lost by 30? I know the fans are mad at me, but I had to roll the dice as far as a coach goes. I'm not some rookie coach," said Patsos, a former longtime assistant at Maryland. "I won a national title as a top assistant coach to Gary Williams. For 13 years I spent on Tobacco Road. I coached a couple of No. 1 picks in the draft. And we scored 48 points. That's the problem that Loyola basketball had today." (implying that his team's offense cost them the game, not their defense).[5"--John Patsos
My point here is that there is SOME rhyme and reason to the outcomes you describe. Its not ALL random chaos. The drivers are often multifactorial.
One factor probably IS the quality of the opponent.
Another factor probably IS subjective value systems of the opposing coach in some cases.
The point is: in games evolving over a time period into emerging complexity, drivers get harder to unsnag, but they are there. It is not all randomness. This was the great revelation of first Chaos Theory and then Complexity Theory in the last quarter of the 20th Century that now shapes policy and strategy in all major fields of science, politics, war, law, and sport. The appearance of chaos in highly instituted, rule based activities, with an array of plays and incentives, may well signal some real chaos, but within that chaos there may well be strange tendencies and predictability of infinite variation within limits. In games with rules the chaos becomes more metaphorical. And game theory dynamics emerge and after a certain amount of play and counter play and exhaustion of the menu of countermoves, an equilibrium strategy, or tendency of play can emerge. Put another way, borrowing one of the early examples used, you may not be able to predict exactly where an eddy will appear downstream from the stick you hold in the current, but you can predict within certain limits where the eddy will form and move. Its fundamentally different than random variance and measurement error. Just gotta think it through and look for it and learn to love the imprecise but still useful predictability of things never quite repeating identically with similar limits. Same for looking for dynamical patterns of play in games. And these tendencies of interplay leave residues of statics that may call attention to them but obscure their process, or obscure them entirely as random noise. Great coaches I believe feel, or perceive, the processes of interplay; they become more than mechanistically cognizant of processes of interplay. They become kind of like savants at pattern recognition
I'm really doubtful that the opponent doesn't matter. It may not be a tightly definable driver, because of the multifactorial contributions of other drivers, but its there and it is not completely elusive to recognize, just not tightly predictable.
I just presented one XTReme case in Patsos that shows how the opponent absolutely DOES matter.
But I feel (and share) your sense of complexity often being too tough to unsnag on available time, budget and information.
Rock Chalk!
Will do.
Oooh, I like that--fiber, or conductive material, in the lines on the floor.
This is what I love about the high tech era: there is a vast ocean of knowledge and technology and someone can always rig up something that will work, and usually cost effectively if they are allowed some time and budget to try to.
Rock Chalk!
Re: your observation that HC didn't try to rebound...
Well, if you say so. That's not what I saw the first half, and the FGA for KU were 27 first half, and 27 the second half, suggests KU's tempo didn't change much. To reiterate, I didn't see what you saw the first half, and I didn't see much of the second half. So: I have tried to rethink the game recognizing what you testify to. After trying to integrate your observation, I have come out with this altered interpretation.
What I saw the first half was Holy Cross running the Princeton, shooting the trey very well at 54%, and shooting decently from the field overall at 48%, but HC was making too many TOs because of KU's defensive pressure, while KU was shooting 80% from trey. The second half Princeton went ice cold and KU stayed pretty warm.
The game was decisively determined by hot shooting and KU's defense, not by KU forcing tempo, if it did, which its constant FGA numbers both halves don't suggest.
Holy Cross wasn't as good as KU in any phase of the game, and shot horribly the second half.
KU shot the lights out over all.
One might ask how KU, on a once every few seasons shooting night,maybe even once every 5 years, did not win by more than 92-59 after shooting 60% from trey, 63% overall, and 100% from the FT line?
The answer?
KU turned it over 15 times; had it stripped from them 8 times; and was +5 on fouling against a much slower team, and with a home whistle on top of everything.
Revised bottom line?
Get ready for this, for I likely could only say this about any but a Self team.
Note: Self teams are prone to the strangest quantitative anomalies of any teams that I have ever watched.
In a 92-59 blow out, KU actually didn't play very good basketball.
They just shot the lights out.
If KU really did force the tempo as you say they did, they discovered that they don't play too well at that tempo, and perhaps ought to either get better at that tempo, or slow it down. Capice?
Take away KU's scalding hot shooting, and a team playing the kind of ball KU played would be ripe for an upset by a Princeton team, or any other kind of team.
Very, very, VERY strange game to analyse
Thanks for making me rethink it.
Rock Chalk!
Lol!
Of. Course it could happen, but until the fouls and TOs come down he would only be netting about 11.
It depends on how many lay ups you want being shot.
I would like to see fouls increased to three or four shots so teams really had to pay for the contact. Or alternatively reduce permitted fouls from 5 to 4. Prefer 3-4 FTs to keep from favoring the haves that can rotate so many guys in.
Popa doesn't worry about the big numbers in his contract turning the NBA into a circus.
So long as the proportionality is sufficient to disperse shooting back across the floor, whatever works.
We could probably run the whole system through Find My Mac with a iPhone 6 at court side, if we could get the nerds at Apple on board.
Shoot the tech is so there we could track both the ball AND the body heat signature and the chips in the toes of both shoes simultaneously. The Internet of things rules!!!!!
That was the mindset that could hold Jordan to 14 Ppg!
Good assist. Tell the shoe whores to write a check for a large order Of satellite gps units, or the units already being used to track real time performance and bio metrics and hang them from the scoreboard in every D1 arena. . The outfit that builds them would love an order for 300 plus units. Economies of scale rule. If they get greedy, pay a Chinese outfit to reverse engineer some for a dime on the dollar. Nothing is too good for the greatest game ever invented..
Outside of the OAD fiasco, apparent Big Shoeco-Big Agency driven recruiting asymmetry, alleged tournament seeding asymmetry and apparent officiating asymmetry aimed at enhancing eyeballs and betting, the biggestest, easy to resolve deficiency of college basketball is the lack of incentive to score anywhere other that the short Trey, or the long Trey. It has left us with a high volatility shooting game with winners increasingly determined by which ever team has a randomly higher long ball shooting percentage on any given night. Defensive scheme matters less and less. Offensive scheme matters less and less. Brannen Greenes matter more and more, because the more of them you have the higher and more frequent the above average shooting night lets you beat the opponent, even if they are quite a bit better. Death by Trey. And as I outlined last season, until this incentive system is changed shortly D1 coaches will begin shooting quick treys every possession until they have a lead to defend and then they will defend it banging for short T treys. Once everyone has copied Self, then the next thing will be quick trigger Treying EVERY possession. It's just been tradition that has made it take this long not to shoot treys quickly every possession. Statistically, the quick Trey every possession will beat every team that tries to play a diversified shooting offense. There is no way around it, especially as the lane is widened, which essentially reduces the short three by big men to a lower percentage shot and thus to two free throws.
OH, and the mid range J is used only in conjunction with jumping into a defender for a hoped for FT, while the 10-15 foot hook is extinct.
Solution:
Erase the current Trey stripe.
Paint a 24 foot 4-point stripe.
Paint a 12 foot 3 point stripe.
Everything inside 12 is 2 points.
Put a GPS chip in the ball, and let an impartial computer with a video tape trailand paper trail of calculations decide with vastly superior accuracy and reliability than refs can do, how many points to award made baskets. This frees the referees to focus on calling fouls correctly, or to be being even more apparently biased!
Free the mid range game!
Yes, Cheick Diallo is so raw even Sushi lovers would like him a little more cooked.
But here is the glass half full on Cheick Diallo.
Cheick has a gallon of athleticism in a quart container.
Let me explain.
Joel Embiid was a gallon container with a gallon of athleticism.
Joel is a quart container. but he has the same gallon of athleticism.
And its spilling out all over the place as he plays, even though he doesn't know diddledy squat about basketball yet.
Cheick Diallo makes Joel Embiid seem like he grew up in the Rucker Leagues.
Cheick is running around on the floor just bouncing around doing amazing things completely out of control and without rhyme or reason.
If this guy were ever to actually learn the game, he could be one of the great tweeners the game has seen for awhile.
This guy make Julian seem like he was nailed to the floor, and Julian could do some amazing things.
Everyone needs to totally stop caring when and how much Cheick plays.
All that matters is that he spends as much time as possible learning to do the most rudimentary things the right way.
Cheick is a poster boy for take it slow if ever there were one.
Put Cheick in the Crock Pot and slow cook him and you are going to have basketball burguignon that all will kill for even in France.
Cheick is one of those guys I like to call a gravity defier. He's not so explosive as he is just plain weightless at times. He can pretty much go off in any direction at any moment.
For god's sake let this guy develop without the blue meanies kicking him in the ACLs until they rip.
Cheick is one of those guys that can play horrible and still some how get points and rebounds.
@DoubleDD said:
Yet this KU team plays better when they run and I mean push the tempo
Allen, Lambert, Rupp, McClendon and Wooden pretty much proved long ago that teams play better on the run. It gives the running team momentum in motion and puts opponents on their heels.
The problem has been that after the proof was recognized a generation of coaches came along that could not attract as many of the great athletes the running game requires, and started looking for how to overcome the running game. Bob Knight, from the long rough Big Ten, understood that Big Ten butcher ball had largely evolved to stop the running game the Ward Lambert at Purdue had evolved. Lambert had pioneered using football sized bruisers for what today would be called the two post positions. These bruisers got the rebounds and Lambert released his jack rabbit guards that he recruited (like John Wooden). What counter strategy that evolved was to play so rough all over the floor as to stop the running game--to deny it. After awhile, only McCracken's Indiana teams continued to try to run. And finally they were subsumed by Big Ten bang ball. But the rest of the country did not embrace Big Ten Bang Ball until Wooden had his great run of fast break basketball. Then Bob Knight looked around and realize that he could fuse Big Ten bang ball with the old Iba principles of slow down and control tempo play (note: which Iba had developed largely as a countervailing strategy for Phog Allen's free wheeling game with Allen's big advantage in playing talent) and do it with just two good players and the rest big lugs. Knight was actually at Army when he began to hatch the new bang ball and innovated his motion offense. With his motion offense and his bruisers and guys that would start cheap shotting when ever 10 down, Knight found a formula that one could win with against running teams with more talent (namely UCLA and UNC), so long as the referees could be conditioned with a lot of early game roughness to permit him to play bang ball for the whole game. Coach K learned this approach while playing for and assisting Knight at Army. But lots of others were coming to similar conclusions. Bang ball worked and you could play bang ball with almost any kind of offense, and any kind of bruisers you could find. Knight is really the father of modern muscle ball.
Fast forward to the height of Knights greatest success and the early wave of Coach K's great success and arrivals of Dick Bennett and Tom Izzo on the scene, along with Bob Huggins back in his early UCinn days and you have the critical mass of bang ball starting to take over the game. Then the Big East is formed and enlarged and completely embraces bang ball too. John Thompson at Georgetown even gives it a racial spin with Hoya Paranoia enforcer ball.
Who finds a solution to all of this either or? Either run, or bang?
Enter Larry Brown and Eddie Sutton who have been perfecting Dean Smith's High Low Carolina passing game into something approximating 70 point take what they give us from a passing offense. These are hit'em where they ain't schemes. If they are giving the run take it. If they are giving the half court game, take it.
And then Brown and Sutton have this kid assistant learn from them--Bill Self. And Self takes this whole 70 point take what they give us thing to a new level of flexibility. He says not only are we going to take what they give us, we are going to play it any way they want. They want to run, we run. They want to grind we grind. They want to play smash mouth, we play smash mouth. Playing this way means Self's teams are theoretically never out of their comfort zones no matter how the game goes. It keeps them in it with running teams that are their best running, and with half court teams that are at their best in half court. While you are running their tempo, then you look for what they are giving you. Boom! You've got them, because they don't want to give up what they do best. Self Ball is that antidote to both the almighty running game and the almighty bang ball game. And he got so successful playing it anyway they want that probably half the coaches in the country have copied to one extent or another.
So: this notion you have of KU getting out and forcing the tempo by "pushing the ball" didn't really happen. What happened was Holy Cross gave the run and Self took it.
It may look to you like KU plays better on the run and they may in this sense: they look good running because they run when the running is being given. Its kind of a self fulfilling prophecy, if you will pardon the pun.
But KU also is among the best grind teams. Why? Because they grind when grind is given; that's why.
KU is always trying to play through the path of least resistance.
When it looks really good playing one way, fans are seduced into thinking KU is a running team. When they play a good grind game, fans are seduced into thinking they are the consummate grind team.
But they are neither. They are a Self Ball team recruited, developed, schemed for and coached to play it anyway they want.
@DoubleDD said:
Shooting the three only has a small part in running fast.
Actually it has a very large part.
The essential difference was the tempo.
Harvard just said no to the running game.
Holy Cross gave it to us and we took it.
If Holy Cross had just said no to the running game, the Holy Cross game would have looked much more like the Harvard game, only with better shooting. We would have beaten Holy Cross by 10-15 instead of 33.
Self ALWAYS takes what they give him.
Holy Cross, unlike Harvard, was quite outmatched on the glass by KU, so the Holy Cross coach picked his poison. He could either stop KU from running, or keep guys back and try to stop KU from having such a lopsided rebounding edge. He tried for offensive rebounds, and he tried for defensive rebounds. But KU was just too long, so KU got the rebounds anyway. And it was off to the races.
Harvard had good luck matching up with KU on the glass and so was able to release guys and so keep KU from trying to run.
Only a very few teams over the course of a season decide to risk letting Self's teams run. They know if they concede the rebounding and release a lot of guys back on defense quickly, Self will slow it down and grind.
Anyone that thinks this blow out of Holy Cross is a defining moment about KU becoming a dedicated running team is kidding himself, or herself.
Few teams will choose to let KU run this season, as Holy Cross did, especially after what became of Holy Cross tonight.
Teams in the Big 12 almost entirely opt to deny the run and let Self grind. Fred tried to run for a few years, but by the end of his tenure and losses to Self, even Fred was deciding it was better to back Self into grind, as happened in the Post Season Tourney last year.
There's a lot of grind in KU's future this season, not because Self refuses to run, but because he takes what they give him.
@tundrahok said:
I think Composite 3
Good correction on the blocks.
I can live with the distortion caused by Perry only playing 26 minutes.