Almost. :broken_heart:
jaybate 1.0
10346 posts
Just read in another thread that Tad Boyle will be assisting Mark Few.
Whew!!!!!!
With a KU man--Tad Boyle--on the bench, the odds of more international gold just spiked.
Rock Chalk!
Go USA!!!!
Phil and I agreed to meet virtually on the most secure classified signal connection available. Unmarked white tankers flew high over his private dooms day get away and sprayed a fine milky haze that conducted quantum encoded bits through lightly scattered bandwidth between us without need of either the commercial internet, or the defense internet, or the doomsday back channel COG internet used in all deep events, or oatmeal containers joined by strings. I agreed to appear holographically at his facility using an algorithm Jobs beamed across THE GREAT DIVIDE and conducted the meeting on Phil's turf, so to speak. Verner Vinge conceived the conduit and laughingly called it a foreshadowing of technological runaway. Alas, we (Phil and myself) agreed to disagree on the current state of talent distribution in D1 regarding KU and Self. But it was a first meeting. Constructive engagement and mutual love of THE GREATEST GAME EVER INVENTED bridges all gaps eventually. Rock Chalk!
(Note: all fiction. No malice.)
Glasses Rx. "Better or worse." Better. Swish.
Healed and enough thigh and calf strength acquired to off set lost pop in ligaments.
Playing 3 instead of two. His natural position.
24 second one-read, no-think offense keeps him focused on making shots instead of timing and multiple reads.
No ball handling chores.
An end to shrinking impact zone attack of Bad Ball. Once again Wayne gets to do what comes most naturally to a player--move to increase impact space, rather than reduce it. Benefit = more open shots. Cost = fewer FTs.
Better suited to guarding 3s than 2s and 3s generally require less defensive effort than 2s, so more energy budget left for shooting legs which implies ---> increased shooting accuracy. Big guys chasing mighty mites for 35 mpg is hard on the big guys. As anyone that had to guard Nic Moore.
Summation: Wayne is experiencing the net benefits of having an offense finally crafted around his abilities and it makes life a lot easier to look good at. Self is like a master tailor. He can tailor his offensive and defensive schemes to fit any player's range of abilities and strengths and weaknesses, like a Kowloon suit.
But like any master tailor, he must make trade-offs in choosing what suit not only fits the player, but also allows the player to fulfill the role the team requires him to play. Some roles are prettier than others, and some players can do some roles better than others. But if a team needs a role fulfilled, someone's gotta do it, no matter what, or the team thing doesn't yield .82 W&L statements.
In seasons past, Wayne has worn a suit of a supporting player as a freshman. The team needed a two, so he played it. But he was injured in the knee, so he didn't look too good playing the role; i.e., no Oscar for best 2 and so Self won no Oscar for best costume design.
Last season, the team needed a full blown glue 2, because Wayne's pop was greatly limited situationally (i.e., he could only elevate off the dead run most of the season and his no-step jump was non existent by season's end). Being the most experienced perimeter player, but the team needing to go with green point guards, he was also needed as a kind of single wing quarterback (ball is hiked to tailback [think point guard], but the quarterback [Wayne's 2] is calling the shifts), while Frank, in his first full season starting at PG, and Devonte, in his first season backing up, learned the ropes and the leadership thing from Wayne, who was himself wearing the leadership cloak for the first time himself. It was, frankly, an ill-fitting suit for anyone to have to wear--too much leadership here, not enough there, too much control here, not enough control there. It lead to a near total brain overload at times that bled into Wayne losing sight of his game and losing sight of what the team was needing from him at many moments. It was the sophomore jinx with a bad suit and incompletely regained pop. Not only were no Oscar nominations forthcoming, some outright rotten tomatoes were justifiably garnered, though only if one were to expect a player to wear an ugly suit and make it look pretty. Even Cary Grant could not have worn the suit Self sewed for Wayne well last season. And Self knew it and that's why Wayne kept getting to play. He knew Wayne was making the best of a bum two-button triple breasted freak of a suit.
Last season, Self clearly tailored the Denzel tux for Perry and it took Perry awhile to find The Designer in himself in that bespoke design Self rough cut for him and then asked him to do the finish work on.
This season, there are enough bodies around, enough pieces of a puzzle, and Perry is comfortable enough, for Self to design Wayne his very own signature George Clooney threads.
Wayne Selden, new specs and all, gets to step out on the floor every game in a role tailored just for what he can do best.
There will be Oscar nominations, if he stays healthy, for him and for Self.
But remember.
While Wayne is in the spotlight and draining treys, and creating space, and taking bows in his sweet suit, there is another Jayhawk that will not be looking as good as we hoped; that will appear to be wearing an ill-fitting suit; that will appear to be doing far less than he is capable of doing.
I don't know who it will be.
But given any 8 to 10 man rotation at any given time of the season, in any team with a true team approach, some one or two fellows are going to be asked to put on a uniform that doesn't fit quite as well as it could, because for this year's Denzel, this year's George, this year's Cary to look and play with the sartorial splender required, eh, some one's gotta be as they say in the Tour de France, the domestique for a season, till its their turn to play the leading man. (Sorry about the metaphor shift, but at two thirds into the Tour and starting the Alps I am unable to completely escape it.)
As the Director of the Basketball Intelligence Agency, I am authorized to double the salary we don't pay you and increase the retirement benefits we cannot give you.
This WUG Logo is truly a work above and beyond the call of duty.
Rock Chalk!!!!!
Weber and Tubby are the best basement coaches in any conference I can think of.
To some extent, the B12's troubles late last season might be attributed to a shortage of big men and a very physical brand of play that wore our teams down.
But I think we were better than we showed in the Madness even so.
Thus, I am drawn back to the hypothesis of whistle asymmetry and seeding designed to enable the stacks for commercial purposes.
If past were prologue, then...
Diallo and Bragg will definitely be back. Five star and four star bigs with holes in their games tend to take 3-4 seasons. Only athletic freak footers like Embiid go first season.
Low or unranked < or = 6 foot guards and moderately ranked 6-2 guards that have not started are not jumping early.
Svi will be back. 17 last season was too green apparently. 18 year olds need two seasons playing tall at the 2, or 3, perimeter positions to get it all together.
Selden will really have to shoot it well for a season, guard another draft choice well, and avoid injury for a season, or he will be back. Wayne will not be able to play 3 at all in the NBA, so playing well at the 3 in D1 will not be enough to get the GMs juiced. He will have to make a high percentage of treys for a season AND show he can lock down some top talent, else wise he is the back court equivalent of a tweener in front court. If Self gives up on Wayne as a 2, it necessarily makes it much, much tougher for him to make it in the NBA. It appears that he has, though Vick's arrival makes it so that Self can at last move Wayne around 1, 2, and 3, as he has long wished to do.
(Note: I believe Self is moving increasingly to thinking that being able to position his two or three best players at several different floor locations and positions is the future of the high low offense. Being able to use his best threats from floor positions, where defenders match up least well is better than any action one can ever design for Mr. Maestro of Impact Play. For the same reason Self DISLIKES zone, he likes being able to have players that can attack either out of several positions, or at least out of several locations depending on the match up. Self hates zones because an opponent always knows where the defenders will be and for the most part who will be there. Zones are too easy to create mismatches against, if you are patient for a few possessions. Similarly, that run with the same guys at the same positions and spots on the floor every time down are easy to adjust your defense to to maximize matchup advantage. Perry got the "show up everywhere on the floor treatment" last season. Wayne seems about to be added to this routine this season. But I digress.)
Vick is a guy with an NBA blue print, despite the vermicelli legs, if his WUG shooting were to prove not an aberration. But he came out of high school a year early and he will likely need a year of seasoning to handle the strength and speed change to D1. But he is gone the next season, if he avoids injury and develops normally.
In short, turnover seems less of a crisis to me than to most others above.
@JayHawkFanToo said:
Too late for that, that train already left the station…
Howling!
I think you are making it too complicated.
Perhaps, but I think I am making it just complicated enough.
Cuonzo's wiki page reads: 142–97 (.594)
.560/.594= .94276094
I can live with that level of error in this sort of analysis, how about you? :-)
We are not exactly trying to connect a bridge across the Grand Canyon to an approach, eh? ;-)
Another way to think about this error is that at either .56, or .59, I would much prefer Bill Self at, oh, say, .753 overall, or .82 the last 12 seasons at KU.
It is kind of like preferrring KU's winning percentage over all over UC-Berkeley's.
KU is at .722.
Cal is at, um, well, Cal is not listed on the top 50 winningest programs of all time.
Cal must be less than .569, because that is where Minnesota ranks at number 50.
To put that in perspective, Cal is behind, oh, say, Fizzouri and Murray State and Minnesota in winning percentage.
Now, regarding Montgomery, a part of my happy point is that Montgomery was a solid coach at Cal with a solid W&L overall and selectively. And his record overall and selectively was significantly better than Cuonzo's. And Montgomery did well at bringing a foundation to Cal. And he had respectable finishes for a major that has experienced more scandal than excellence since the brief run of Pete Newell's success. It at least appears that Cal should have been able to find a coach with a better life time and selective record than Cuonzo. But Harry Edwards apparently liked Cuonzo. Hmmmm. Not sure why Harry matters in the hiring of a Cal coaches but I will hazard a hypothesis that some how sports institutes and Big Shoes have an evolving dynamic. So: whatever processes appear to distribute talent with apparent asymmetry around the college basketball landscape subject perhaps to the dynamics of Big Shoe, Big Agent, coaching networks, and advocacy groups, etc., apparently liked Cuonzo, too. Cuonzo appears to have a short stack already.
Hmmmm.
First, I guess we both have to stand corrected by @Texas-Hawk-10 and start saying "American Athletic Conference." (AAC)
Next, this conference is significantly better than I realized, when I took a look. It includes: Memphis, Temple, 'natti, and UConn. The last three would have been tough match ups for KU last season and the 'Natti had a darned good team.
Nevertheless, I am down, as some Alphabet generation used to say, with valid indexing.
My thinking is your formalization of indexing is helpful, but probably needs a little fine tuning for the anomaly of last season, when Nic was AAC POY.
Most years, your AAC < B12 inequality holds strong. But to be fair in indexing, I have to admit that I watched the 'Natti last season and they were VERY tough. Likable? No. Tough? Very.
And I watched SMU late last season and they were certainly good enough to have had a better than even chance against any B12 conference title threat team. They likely would have finished nearly as high, give or take a rank or two in the B12 last season, as the two teams finished in the AAC. This at least suggests to me that maybe the differences between the conferences were a bit less by the conference seasons than the pre conference comparisons of the past might have suggested. And in particular against the B12 conference champion, KU, it seems either 'Natti, which showed so well in the Madness, or SMU, which got bum whistled out of it, would have had a good chance of winning the B12 last season, or at the very least upsetting KU at least as often as ISU. Those were two very good AAC teams. And Temple was tough. And frankly, the B12 basement has been nothing to write home about for the last few years, despite the roughness of the game permitting them to win a few games by catching top teams injured or on emotional let downs in conference.
The Big 12 turned out not to have been quite so good as some thought last season. I mean, KU's weakest team in a long time won it outright. And Big 12 teams did not show well again in the Madness against non conference teams, when such competition counts most. And though I have hardly studied it closely, I recall someone saying the NBA draft was one indication that the Big 12 teams were apparently not uber talented.
So, when one gets out the indexing logic and tries to apply it, while the AAC tends to be less strong than the B12 most years, last season what appears to have happened was this: The Big 12 was still relatively more talented, especially through the middle, than AAC, but the B12's usual two top teams--KU and Texas--were far weaker than usual, even though early season expectations ran high for Texas (and were disproven). ISU seemed to come on strong, but like most B12 teams, it was a doughnut with a hole in the middle. And it gets sharply more difficult to assign a huge edge to the B12 when it is a conference with few bigs. ISU and KU last season held no huge advantage in bigs over mid majors like 'Natti and SMU in the AAC, or for that matter WSU in the MVC. And the B12's usual large edge in coaching was diminished at least some by LB being at SMU a second season. LB, Ollie, Dunphy, and Pastner (based on his winning percentage anyway), stack up pretty evenly with any four B12 coaches right?
So AAC < B12 is subject to significant variance last season bringing them much closer together than usual, at least in my anecdotal assessment.
It follows then that while in most years your equality of "3rd team All-Con B12 = 1st Team All Con AAC" would tend to hold, last season it probably was more like: "2rd team All Con AAC = 1st team All Con B12."
And when one adds in that when Nic was added to KU's WUG team the team promptly appeared to play sharply better than it had in the past, even without a lot of its players, well, it seems Devonte has some significant shoes to fill.
Further, when you stop and think about it, Devonte has a long way to go to develop into an indexed equivalent of Nic being POY of AAC which might index to "1st or 2rd runner-up POY in the B12.
There is really no way around this: Nic is pretty damned good and Devonte, while he sure seems within striking range of developing into as good of a player over time, has a ways to go.
Without putting too fine a point on it, Devonte has a long way to go-- having not been a starter as a freshman on one of Self's most injury riddled teams, then having gotten injured to point of not being able to play at all at the WUG, and so now having to start his sophomore year having to come back from injury.
Again, my point is not to knock Devonte at all. It is to put him in a reasonably indexed perspective of what he has to replace.
I am very confident that--injury recovery permitting--Devonte will this season be able to replace a piece of what Nic brought and for that we are most fortunate and it may be enough with the other pieces that we will hopefully add--BG, Svi, and Diallo--to make us a very good team in our own right without Nic--maybe even a better one. There is no doubt the Devonte, BG, Svi, and Diallo all operating as D1 capable 20 mpg men would turn this team in a huge force in D1, regardless of the short and medium stacks apparently placed strategically around D1.
But we will need them all reaching solid 20mpg men to really stand out IMHO.
Rock Chalk!!!!
Thanks for the clarification. And I do. :-)
Cuonzo replaced Montgomery at Cal. Montgomery is .681 overall, according to his wiki page.
Johnny Jones, who has risen to .572 overall after 4 good years building on Trent Johnson's recruits, was .484 at Memphis and .564 at North Texas State before taking over LSU and after a couple seasons moving into apparent short to medium stack country.
It is all so complicated.
Domestic big men don't go to big man u.
Domestic OAD/TADs would rather sit on the bench at UK than start for Self, who has a similar record and the same number of rings as Cal.
.560 Cuonzo can sign an adidas lean OAD 3 to Cal, when Bill cannot same to the most storied program in D1 on a quarter century long roll and the winningest decade in college basketball, and even though Self has put Brandon Rush, Xavier Henry, Andrew Wiggins in the lottery, or nearly so. And I'm not even mentioning our 3 last season who got drafted.
Bill Self has never left a trail of infractions.
Bill Self has never vacated a season, much less two.
Bill Self has converted practically his entire staff to African Americans without being scolded, or shamed, into it..
USA cannot win WUG for a decade or so, but Bill Self goes and takes an injury and eligibility depleted team to Korea and whips everyone's asses for gold.
But Bill Self cannot sign a domestic OAD footer, or even a foreign OAD footer. He has to turn a foreign footer project into an OAD.
Bill Self can also not sign an OAD PG unless he is sloppy seconds from an imposing program. Not once in ten seasons.
Now Bill Self cannot even sign an adidas lean OAD 3.
Help me, help me, help me, I think I'm going insane. :-)
From a pure basketball stand point, if I recall correctly, Nic is a first team all conference player his junior season at SMU.
From a pure basketball stand point, Devonte has to first get to where he can start.
Next he has to get to where he can be a starting point guard on the team, so that he can bring that level of skill to sharing point guard duties with someone like Frank Mason.
Next Devonte has to make third, or second team All Conference.
Next, Devonte has to make first team all conference his junior season.
And all of this is BEFORE he can even get a chance to be BETTER than Nic.
I like Devonte.
I like that he is taller than Nic.
Other things equal, it is better to be taller than shorter in basketball.
Alas, Devonte is also taller than Nate Archibald and Calvin Murphy.
Devonte might also be taller than Steve Nash and John Stockton.
Jason Kidd was taller than Nate Archibald.
I think Jason Kidd was a helluva ball player. But I would take Tiny over Jason regardless of era and regardless of height. I would take Stock over Jason, too, though they might have been the same height.
As @drgnslayr says: about 80 percent of the game is played from 6 feet 6 inches or so on down to the floor on the x-axis. And a really good x-axis player is good at forcing an even higher percentage of action down onto that x-axis.
We ought not put Devonte Graham behind an eight ball. He can sure be a good replacement for Nic. We are fortunate.
But as I wrote above some time ago now, Nic is going to have to be replaced in bits and pieces by the contributions of several players.
And by the time Devonte were a junior, wouldn't we all be thrilled, if he were first team all conference, like Nic?
If I assume for a moment the hypothesis that the dynamics of Big Shoe, Big Agent, Tubbie Smith's new coaching association, and the Drake Group are converging, I am inclined to guess Pastner is a dead coach walking already, unless he makes a deep run in the Madness.
And if he does not go quietly, as Mike Montgomery did; or if he refuses to go at all, say, like Roy Williams, how long will it be before it will be learned that there were easy classes, or some other not perhaps unprecedented improprieties, at Memphis to encourage Pastner to move on?
"...for the times they are a-changin'"
I recall that there were a couple recent hires at reputed non elite majors with reputed .560s records overall when hired that were apparently reputedly able to sign players Bill Self with a .82 at an elite major reputedly tried for.
So: I Wondered if maybe a similar hire might be in the future at Memphis.
Vote here?
Will he get a short or medium stack?
Josh is only as good as his father's AAU talent connection.
And stacking increasingly obsoletes it.
TIME WAITS FOR NO NEPOTISTIC.
Ah, ok. Thx 4 clarifying.
:-)
Marital bliss?
I have always believed that it is akin to "the pursuit of happiness"--an ideal that inspires us to get better, but which is in reality always just over the horizon.
Be strong. Being the daddy to a family and a relationship often requires admitting another human being cannot be fixed and is a deeply flawed person momentarily battling the ghosts of their parents by substituting their mate momentarily.
Go fishing.
Or substitute savaging my post for further conflict amidst the quest for marital bliss.
Fishing is more fun, though.
Rock Chalk!!!
PHOF!
Really astute assessment of Traylor. Gave words to what I could only sense. Thanks.
I think ya gotta separate ball handling and shooting.
Frank is such a great trifectate and FT shooter that me makes one giddy about having him as a PG.
Looked at in isolation, I am not sure he is a superior ball handler. Miles, Vaughn and Jordan were terrific ball handlers without the inflation of being such good shooters. Miles particularly was a brick artist.
If I look at Frank I see a now competent ball handler, who could join the ranks of Miles, Vaughn and Jordan if he improves another year.
He still lacks the light speed acceleration of Tyshawn Taylor on the way to the iron, though he actually seems to have faster acceleration that Tyshawn had in open court. Tyshawn was the fastest there ever was in college basketball for those first three steps and dribbles. Insane fast. Photon phast. Plasma fast. Two flipping places at once fast.
Frank lacks Darnell's and Russell's phenomenal combinations of strength, mass and speed that allowed them defensively manhandle opponents, but he is probably better than both otherwise, though Darnell suffers from playing in another era and a less dynamic system. Its hard to do Darnell justice except to say his numbers one or two years were staggering, regardless of era.
Frank cannot come close to Sherron overpowering opponents on the drive, or to Sherron's total wins, so far, but he seems wilier.
But of course no one can touch Frank as a flipping rebounder.
The jury is in.
Frank is the best rebounder on our team last year, this summer, and likely next season. I don't every recall being able to say a point guard was the best rebounder on any team I have ever seen in my entire life. But Frank is on ours.
If Self started Frank at center, I am pretty confident Frank would pull down 15-17 rpg, whether or not he got scored on at will because of being so short. He is that good. We are talking Bill Bridges in "Honey, I Shrunk the Rebounder."
And part of his rebounding is his incredible hand size and hand strength for his height. The guy clamps down on a rebound like Wilt and Bill Bridges, ferrchrissakes.
Frank is in some ways as big of a freak of nature as Wilt.
I've never seen a PG this short do this many things well including rebound like a power forward.
Most of the time Frank has me shaking my head with his freakish rebounding; so much so that perhaps I underrate the rest of his game as a result.
Regardless, I feel like we haven't seen him really have a conventional shooting slump. Until we do, I am not sure I can objectively gauge how good of a ball handler he is or isn't. I can't get past the consistency of his shooting and the freaking rebounding!!!!!!!!
Howling!
Hi, my name is Wilt Chamberlain and I'm a four. 😀
P.S.: I can't recall where I heard this, but I find the sentiment increasingly prescient: "Instead of Wacko-Liberals, substitute ' Wacko-Conservatives and Wacko-Liberals Carefully Funded by the Same Private Oligarchy Advocating Deindustrialization of America and De-institutiing of American Civil Liberties Using as Justification Whatever Crises Real or Contrived Are Available at any Given Moment Followed Eventually by a Coup d'Gras of Massive Currency Devaluation and Theft of America's Publicly Owned Resources and Infrastructures'" Its a little wordy, but some how captures things memorably despite itself. :-)
An interesting question for which, alas, I have no pithy, insightful answer.
But as I am always able to strike new phrases, and in fact enjoy doing so, if someone wishes me to quit using stacking on grounds it disrespects someone's race, color, creed, etc., I will of course oblige them.
I have never felt it a burden to call any persons struggling to escape oppression by what ever names and modifiers they prefer. Anything to help another human being get free always rubs me the right way. If it helps them get beyond their predicaments inflicted on them by society's less virtuous aspects, and it costs me nothing but changing a word, or turn of phrase, I would feel like a really uncivilized alias were I not to oblige.
Rock Chalk!
File this in which Ka-Ka Runs Down Hill.
To decode the above, the BIA Director and acting janitor will resort to an analogy.
When a bully steals your lunch on the way to school, and the Principal won't discipline the bully, because the bully's father is the major donor to your school, you bow up your neck and decide to steal his lunch.
But when you steal his lunch, he boxes your ears and takes your lunch every day for two years. Everyone knows what is happening. You can't get any relief. And you are getting very hungry.
What do you do?
You concede your lunch to the bully and then you go looking for a weaker kid who's lunch you can steal.
You become the bully.
Its maybe hypothetically like predator prey cascades in food chains.
Hypothetically speaking, Nike is vacuuming up adidas leans and they are turning up in short and medium stacks in lowly places with .560 coaches, like in Baton Rouge and Berkeley.
KU has apparently been bucking the trend for a couple of years now. It has appeared to outflank the stacking with Canadian and African players that seem to be more willing to change leans. But this past recruiting season the bullying got so bad that KU wound up netting only one projected OAD/TAD, because, ostensibly, real OAD footers just didn't want to go toe to toe in practice each day with the likes of Jamari and Landen.
So: the KU program with its voracious appetite for new talent each season of the OAD/TAD era (typical of all D1 schools trying to competed in this increasingly asymmetric landscape of D1), was apparently starting to feel hunger pangs.
And then Nike-Cal apparently feeling the pressure of not winning with his long stack the last two seasons (Nike-LSU apparently suddenly joining the stacking party to make it two in the SEC) comes out and appears to suggest more or less that he is going to have to go out and go on (to take poetic metaphorical license to heighten the sense of the satyric absurdity) raiding parties (beyond the Nike lean base?) to keep up the talent level at Nike UK. He is going to have to try to start attracting kids younger where ever they might be. Whatever he really meant, what we witnessed was UK reputedly suddenly and unsubtly going hot and heavy after some adidas leans KU was apparently pursuing. So much for oligopolists respecting preceding regime boundaries.
For lack of a better analogy, if you were an evolutionary biologist, you might call it moving down the food chain.
So: what appears to be happening now?
KU-adidas appears to be going after UA leans.
Lunch anyone?
You remember UA. They appear to be Chrysler to Nike's GM and adidas Ford, at least back in the good old days of the auto oligopoly; i.e., before the most recent bail out circa late naught decade and before the next one looming after the rumored imminent currency crisis.
It all appears a cascade of sorts, hypothetically speaking of course.
Basketball Social Darwinism 2.0.
Neo-Social Darwinism being the rationalization would-be civilized societies resort to when they decide to devalue the currency and prune the herd the hard way, rather than write-off the debts and preserve civil liberties and the republic.
But I digress.
Stacking appears an evolving approach to achieve feasible target benefits of asymmetric talent distribution, if my hypothesis were to approximate reality accurately.
SHORT AND LONG STACKS: >3 OAD/TAD IN ROTATION
LSU
UK
UNC
Duke
Cal
UA
MSU
Notice we are not just talking 5 star talent for Perry was a five star and he is going 4 seasons without major injury as a driver. We are talking about "projected" OAD/TAD talent.
KU has only two players that were "projected" as OAD/TAD players: Diallo and Selden. Injuries derailed Selden into a 3AD, but healed he now seems ready to fulfill his OAD/TAD projection. But this count is not about fulfillment of projection. It's about projected OAD/TADs.
Hypothesis: There appears a move away from three long stacks of 8-9 OAD/TADs to 6 or 8 short stacks of greater than 3 OAD/TADs that appears geared to put two short stacks in each tournament region, perhaps as a less conspicuous, more sustainable, and more effective means of dominating all four brackets.
Three apparent long stacks last season--UK, Duke and UA--and an apparent favorable whistle netted only two of four slots in the FF; that's only a 50/50 probability of a title without the refs and with a lot of uncomfortable appearances and top talent sitting on benches. Very heavy handed.
6 to 8 short stacks seems more an odds maker's approach, doesn't it?
The ideal would be 2 short stacks in each power five conference feeding into 2-3 short stacks in each tournament region.
The short stack approach hinges on channeling more talent away from the challenger brand and spreading talent a little more thinly to get more coverage of the top and bottom of the bracket; i.e., the 1 and 2 seeds of each bracket.
The hypothetical object would be to rely less on refs to shape outcomes, which could be an embarrassing and sometimes hard to conceal corruption of the process that could discourage betting over time.
Let probability and the seeding structure do the heavy lifting.
The asymmetric whistle should be used sparingly.
But it's all hypothetical, of course.
The difference is UK/UL GENERATES HUGE EYEBALLS AND RECRUITING BUZZ in the EST, where the eyeballs and recruits are.
We learned from the Fizzou Rivalry, which was as big a rivalry as existed, that it meant little as a recruiting-marketing tool outside the four state region. It did not help talent flow, or national ranking, whether both teams were good or not.
You are right that we need rivalries.
But we need them in the EST. And they don't want a rivalry game with us for the same reason we don't want a rivalry game with WSU: location, location, location.
As the B12 stands, our best bets for rivalries are WVU in the EST and a Texas team.
The B12 has to expand into the EST to solve our need for a rival. I suspect Self keeps scheduling Philly teams to build KU's viability in that market overtime and lay some groundwork for eastward expansion.
Go east, young man!
The difference is UK/UL GENERATES HUGE EYEBALLS AND RECRUITING BUZZ in the EST, where the eyeballs and recruits are.
We learned from the Fizzou Rivalry, which was as big a rivalry as existed, that it meant little as a recruiting-marketing tool outside the four state region. It did not help talent flow, or national ranking, whether both teams were good or not.
You are right that we need rivalries.
But we need them in the EST. And they don't want a rivalry game with us for the same reason we don't want a rivalry game with WSU: location, location, location.
As the B12 stands, our best bets for net benefit rivalries are WVU in the EST and a Texas team.
The B12 has to expand into the EST to solve our need for a rival. I suspect Self keeps scheduling Philly teams to build KU's viability in that market overtime and lay some groundwork for eastward expansion.
Go east, young man!
P.S.: if you think Self is suspicious about Trey balling, he is absolutely a sceptic about helter skelter bigs. He likes big Barry White M#%^F#%^#ing bigs. Rock solid low voiced stable daddy style bigs. Peripatetic gives him hives. He needs extra reassurance from the peripatetic types.
Kick ass, mid season level of analysis in the off season gives you the gold for the summer so far!!!
Particularly good dissection of Nic, who did not seem to play to his past levels with KU, but who I still found to be decisive in creating the team psychology needed to be the winner they became. I agree with stats that suggest Devonte could be a more productive player, but a more apt comparison would be Nic's numbers last season with Devonte's last season, since both teams run mostly the same stuff according to Self.
Hunter clearly had the rug pulled out from under him by Self the last game by benching him at crunch time. Self sent a clear signal that Diallo and Lucas are his 5s for the coming season, despite Hunter's superb production. Best advice to Hunter is work on guarding the post and add another 10 pounds. Self is biased against Hunter the way he was biased against Kevin Young for a time, but overtime Self overcomes the bias if you keep producing.
Count me among the skeptical minority.
I still think this team in a best case scenario will wind up like UW the last two seasons.
They don't have enough OAD and 5 star talent to finish against a stack with a good coach.
They could upset a Johnny Jones, or Cuonzo, stack, because Jones and Cuonzo are untested in the finals and .560 coaches.
They could upset a completely green stack, because of their experience.
But if they run into a stack with a nice mix of OADs and TADs, it will be very tough for them to compete effectively.
The stacks will have footers plural.
Diallo has never had to stop footers twice in three days AND rebound AND score AND hedge defend with a wide lane, which he will have to do, if this team were to go all the way.
Going all the way with this team just seems wildly optimistic at this point.
We are talking about a team with a total of one projected OAD center (Diallo), a 5 star senior (Ellis), a 4-star Frosh (Bragg), and a ThreeAD wing (Selden). Among these, Diallo and Selden and Ellis seem likely draft choices, but none of them are every game MUAs, except maybe for Selden. Among the rest of the team there appears not a single draft choice next season and only Vick and Bragg appear likely draft choices out in the future.
There will probably be 6-8 teams with sharply more talent than KU next season. Probably 4 of them will be stacks.
KU has huge question marks around the healing of Graham and Greene.
KU's great WUG team loses its only proven all-conference level player--Nic Moore.
I am glad you are juiced.
And I am not dismissing your optimism out of hand, because you and others were bullish on the team's chances before the WUGs, when I was also pessimistic, and you all were vindictated.
But in the age of stacks, and biased seeding, and biased whistling, which we are still in, it takes a lot of talent to getter done.
But damn I hope you are right.
Football is such a numbers game. You've got to have 44 terrific football players plus a kicker to be a serious threat. Something like 60 buys the injury insurance to compete year in and year out. It appears over the past 10-20 years that few newcomers crack those kinds of numbers without infractions, or XTReme Plausible Deniability.
KU has to weigh the cost of committing infractions to join the elite programs with the blow back of that kind of recruiting behavior on basketball. In the status quo, if KU doesn't try to steal recruits from the football majors, everyone leaves KU alone in basketball. But if KU starts trying to steal the lifeblood recruits from the football majors, a lot of hard nosed operators in football will begin sifting through the KU dumpster for incriminating stuff.
If KU is really clean, then they will invent stuff.
It is a big risk to basketball to try to get really good in football.
You have to attract so many bodies that you are bound to ruffle some feathers along the way.
K-State's pursuit of football has been very successful, but it was a long time coming and it started a long time ago, and their basketball program essentially imploded but for a few brief spurts, when they were hiring guys like Huggins and Martin, who were about the farthest thing from choirboys you could get.
And KSU football has not appeared pretty below the surface, from what little I have been able to glean.
The most realistic hope for KU is getting to .500 for awhile.
If we seriously challenge for titles on a regular basis all hell will probably break loose.
The money is just too big anymore--the revenues and sunk costs and licensing relationships too crucial--to tolerate any sudden changes in the regime of winners and losers in power conferences.
@VailHawk et al,
I kind of doubt Devonte alone can replace Nic.
It will take all of the team taking on some of Nic's qualities.
Nic is a special human being in the same way Russ Rob was.
Self once said that RussRob didn't always look that good, but the longer you were around him the more you noticed he tended to be on the winning side of the scrimmage, or something to that effect.
There are just some guys that have this peculiar kind of genius that is not always appreciated, or highly compensated in our society, because it is not easily isolated and measured. But there are always one or two of them on a championship team.
Until one works with any kind of genius, it is hard to know what a great mind is capable of. It is hard even to recognize real genius. But once you have been around one, you realize how much more you are capable of, and that a significant part of genius is simply hard work. It is actually liberating to see real genius be stymied, shift gears, scale problems up and scale them down in search of a fitting solution. There is much of genius that "ordinary" persons can emulate and so become much, much more productive in their work. Genius is not worth near as much in one off solutions, as it is in rubbing off on a group to up its collective effectiveness.
Nic has some team dynamic genius.
The problem is: by scheduling them regularly, we are building them up into being more attractive to the next coach to replace Marshall. And with the Koch money, they are going to be able to keep hiring good coaches if they can schedule non conference games against elite majors like KU. Thus, we are damned, if we do and damned if we don't. If they stay successful, then we have to keep playing them with no marketing pay back. If they fall by the way side quickly, then we have wasted a couple of chances at marketing to the EST for a payback, we will most likely get a chance for in the early rounds of the NCAA each season, as the NCAA tries to get rid of WSU, or KU, ASAP each tournament.
Don't worry about pay back. We will get them early in this year's NCAA again. Its how the TV-seeding thing works. They try to get rid of small market teams ASAP. We just have to be ready to punch WSU's noses out the backs of their heads the next time. Self knows how Marshall plays the game now, so I suspect the gloves will come off.
As @HighEliteMajor once aptly (and a little uncomfortably) paraphrased from the Nicholson character (a villain) in the movie "A Few Good Men" about Self: we want him on that wall, we need him on that wall. He makes a lot of tough decisions that the rest of us have the luxury not to have to make. Your competitive juices say schedule and play the suckers and beat them into the next century ASAP. But Self is balancing that desire with the life blood of the program (EST marketing for adidas and recruiting of players from the EST) and taking the flak for not scheduling WSU to prove our collective manhoods. Why? Because he knows that he will get his shot at WSU come tournament time.
His approach was partially vindicated last tournament. Indeed, we got our shot early against Wichita State without having to waste a regular season scheduling spot on them. And there is sure is NO advantage to to KU to play them more than once a season. Alas, Self's strategy was not fully vindicated, because KU was too thin, young and banged up to handle a punking spree by an older, more experienced WSU coached by a very tough customer in Marshall. But Self understands there will be more early match-ups with WSU, so long as the Kochs keep the money valve open at WSU, and Marshall keeps coaching there. Every year, likely as not, KU and WSU will get in the same bracket and run into each other in the first, or second, round, if the seeding committee can find anyway at all to justify the pairing.
So: again, my heart is with you, but my head is with Self.
My heart is with you, but my head is with Self.
Year in and year out we are better off marketing our brand on the coasts for recruiting and exposure.
If the state of Kansas produced players like Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio do, and if Kansas were in the EST, as UK and UL are, then it could make sense treating WSU like UL. But the "ifs" aren't.
Marshall could leave tomorrow and then we would be stuck riding a bus to Wichita every other season.
Self wants to beat Marsha more than all of us combined, but he is making the right call for the program.
Nic is an all conference player in a non power conference. He is a mature player. He is a winner that doesn't always look so good, but always seems to be on the winner at the playground. He is a dwarf that forces every one on a team to say there is no opponent too tall to guard, because Nic guards guy 4-6 inches taller than him all the time.
Devonte plays older than his age, but he is a soph and has still not been a starter.. He is normal height: 6-2. Despite the baby face, he plays tough. He can match Nic shooting and passing, but can he defend and attack with as much uncanny edginess and timing? Can he take other players out of their comfort zones, like Nic can? Can he own the x-axis game in and game out? Can he make teammates look in the mirror and say, "If he can, I can!" That is the essence of what Devonte is replacing--even assuming he fully recovers his pop after injury.
Nic was such a strong personality he could step into a team and let Frank stay the PG leader--his usual role, yet also become the psychological cornerstone of the team--the alpha with the street smart swag to let Frank, and Wayne and even Hunter be who they were.
I believe it was Nic and his 'tude that made our guys quit looking to the bench after misses and mistakes, like whipped currs. They played like confident players, mistakes and all.
This is what Devonte has to replace.
Or maybe it's what he can now become.
Like the old war movies in which a tough sergeant that has molded a bunch of boys into men is killed and is succeeded by one of the least likely guys. You know. The Sands of Iwo Jima that every one makes fun of, but that everyone that has ever played on a champion knows is the real model of transference that has to happen for great things to happen. The leader must eventually be absorbed by the lead. The leader so desperately needed must become unnecessary.
Hell yes Devonte and the KU team can replace their diminuitive Sergeant Stryker!
Now each knows what each must become on his own.
This is the real hero myth.
Until we see former KU players as commentators, always assume Bilas is playing all situations for coach K. Bilas is smart and tilted toward KU when making alliance was expedient for slowing the UK machine. Now he is clearing KU from the wake.
BILAS IS AN EMBED.
Fool me once, shame on me...
Howling!!
😀
The Legacy continues.
It should be a separate trophy case with no trophy. Just a photographic record of a coach accepting the challenge and his group of young players that faced ever increasing adversity and improbability of winning climbing the mountain for themselves and their country amidst virtual indifference from media and scorn from other schools and players too cowardly to commit. The last picture is them with their medals and a plaque that reads "Never let it be forgot; that once there was a place called Camelot."
There has to be a commemoration of this! Did you see what these boys overcame and how they piled onto each other in joy? This may have been the last real amateur team to slay Giants in the world. I respect what they did so much!
This is one of those huge things that occurs out of the lime light.
If we can't recognize this sort of heroism, then heroism is done for!
Self may also run it because Iba occasionally takes over his body. 😀
The problem with the chop is it gets your shooters concentrating on hand offs and timing instead of on making baskets.
Imagine having your rebounders run the chop to get in position for a rebound.
It is silly to run the chop for just a trey.
You don't need to run the chop to get an open three. KU gets all the open treys it needs by anyone guy dribbling forward a step and then stepping back. You run it to take up time and tire the opponent with sliding, so you can turn a ninety on him and blow by for a short Trey down the lane.
Time and again it takes our guys out of reacting in the moment and into thinking about execution.
I used to like it. Now I don't.
Nick has been chewed on by the best by LB. He is not a big talker, but he is a rock. He is built psychologically like he is physically. He and Frank have similarities. But Frank still isn't absolutely sure he knows what he is doing, so he can't always be absolutely confident in knowing to go forward without hesitation. Nic cuts to the Essence immediately. He sees what has to be done and does it. He can't always get it done but he is almost right every choice. And he never wastes time dribbling through his legs trying to get the right angle or decide what to do; that's a tell. Nic isn't the greatest player, but he is one of the most efficient, and he knows what his teammates need. He won't put a ball somewhere where one guy doesn't like it. And he was this way with a team he has barely played with. And that play after Selden's Trey! Most guys would never have even thought to do it! Go for a steal after a dagger shot? In second OT? To ice a game? Effing brilliant! Surprised the hell out of everyone and put KU IN CONTROL!
Hell yeah!
The great ones know exactly when to do so.
Coach Self may have gone to the next level of his career today.
Go, Bill, go!!!!!!
Because we are America. How come we had to fight revolutionary war? It comes with the turf of leading, rather than following!
Regarding Nic, I would give everything to have him play for KU.
He is the RussRob of runts.
He is a helluva basketball player.
His character is what allowed this team to transform from Self's team into the players USA team. HE IS AN AMAZING GUY. I am on his team wherever he goes.
Nic Moore even rubbed off on Frank.
Nic will be the next great coach of the LB tree.