It's not love. I don't even like it. But...
Everyone was copying Bad Ball down the stretch. It is not talent limitation driven. It is referee driven. Drive ball is here until the refs change.
jaybate 1.0
10346 posts
Listen to Self in the off season at your risk.
In past off seasons he has talked about pressing and running the triangle and shooting the trey more than ever before! 😄
By his deeds shall he be known.
BAD BALL!
Great points, slayr.
WUG.
Maui.
New housing.
Best arena.
Long list of recent draft choices playing in the NBA.
Experienced point guard and stretch 4 returning.
PT for a 3.
PT for a footer.
But no 3.
And no 5.
How shall I put it it.
Something else is driving program choice.
Imagine what is now feasible. Imagine Tesla's new all-wheel drive 4-door cut into a raised 6-pak El Camino with your Dakota's tires. 265 miles on a battery pack charge. 3 minute battery pack swaps at the service station. A Tesla battery solar reservoir at your house and tesla solar panel on your roof ready for fast charging your Tesla El Camino that can tow a 23 foot Cobalt boat, or go off roading. Instant up dates to firm ware and software through uplinks to Space X satellites. A giga battery plant producing scalable lithium ion batteries at economies of scale for home use in global markets that make batteries (and solar panels) for home and car become dirt cheap and houses go off the electric grid and cars go off the the gasoline pumps. Solar, wind and geothermal suddenly become viable, storable generation alternatives. Two billion cars steadily convert to electric. Two billion electric home battery back ups make 2 billion homes go steadily off the grid.
Regime change perma war and oil dumping and first strike enabling ABMs combine to keep new crude off the market and competing oil backed central banks from flourishing. But refined crude pricing remains fixed, while energy grids are simultaneously weakened by houses going off grid incrementally with Tesla batteries. East, West USA grids user bases shrink and so merge.
Military begins migration beyond oil engines. Military realtime Recharging accomplished by lasers from Space X satellites.
Something as big as the Admiralty migrating ships in the 1890s from steam to diesel is under way.
Something very big is being signaled with the cheap Saudi oil, but what?
I don't see why teams like ISU MAKE A BIG DEAL OUT OF WINNING THE CONFERENCE TOURNAMENT. Any team that wins the conference is not going to go all out. The conference tournament only ranks the also Rans.
Wake up and go stalk someone, ISU.
KU is the undisputed heavy weight champion of the B12!
I agree with you here. And this is where regulation properly laid down can help minimize this problem. Self and most coaches act this way because the rules both make doing so necessary to win and and permit it.
I suspect Self and most coaches would prefer rules that deny them all this approach. But until it is denied, they will do so.
Regulation is a great tool when used skillfully and wisely.
I felt pretty optimistic about AWIII once upon a time. I always felt something off the court might have lead to him leaving, but I never read a credible explanation of what it might have been, and I couldn't come up with something myself. So: until I hear something, or see him do something awesome at NU, I will just reckon he was not as good as BG.
KU All American and Hall of Fame college basketball coach Ralph Miller (Chita State, Iowa, and Oregon State) always said that he could always go to a high school and find a kid 6-8 or over that had never touched a basketball and turn him into a useful back up post man for any team he was shy of height on. He did it a couple times to prove it and it worked. Because of that, I am for signing 7-0 Thon Maker for sure. IMHO, people worry way too much about the effect of an individual player's effect on team chemistry. Its right to worry if you absolutely were to have to play the guy to field a credible rotation, but not if not. If he were just an optional piece, like Thon Maker would be, then it is incredibly easy to get rid of a bad actor. So since we've got a credible array of short to medium bigs, and could get along without TM, then I say sign him and try to squeeze something out of him, unless there is another player that offers a lot more.
No, I think they are just noting that he and Keith Langford seem kind of the exceptions to the rule of KU struggling a bit with signing Texas recruits.
Gotta recruit Tayhoss, because there are 30+ million folks down there.and increasingly the brain scanning research will funnel more and more of the Texas kids into basketball. Texas population is an increasingly big percentage of persons that don't go back more than one generation, and so don't have Darrel Royal as a kind of demigod in the backs of their minds.
The same thing is happening to Texas that happened to California. People like it and they want to stay there to live and work, but some of the old counter productive traditions, like football will slowly begin to be limited to that dwindling portion of the population that does not care if their children are brain damaged for fun in high school on Friday nights. It will take time, and it will never go away, any more than bull fighting ever goes away completely, but it will diminish in significance over time.
It will take another 20-30 years, but Texas and football will one day not be anymore synonymous than California and football. The big global money is in basketball petroshoes and petroapparel, not in petro football cleats and shoulder pads. The writing is on the market study wall.
Californians once LOVED football and frankly produced more than their share for much of the 20th Century even though they had lots of other things to do all that time. Southern California had not one but TWO one hundred thousand seat football stadiums BEFORE World War II!!!! But there came a tipping point, when the culture changed from so much immigration; even that in southern California, which was where most of the transplanted old south (Carolinas, Georgia, etc.) and old new south (Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas) southerners moved to and so made California's south both so politically conservative, cotton and tree plantation oriented, and so football loving.
KU ought to keep recruiting Tayhoss. Heck, between our former assistant that is at A&M now and Janks at SMU, we have Jayhawkers down there that could recruit the heck out of Texas if Self ever hired them back. And of course we have Keith Langford that could be drawn upon, and Billy Gillispie could be risen from the dead and redeemed with a bit of fundamentalist assistance.
But its a little more complicated than just jocks and shoes and on the ground knowledge of Texas right now.
There also appears to be some political tension between the states of Texas and Kansas right now over oil policy and over who should be the next president within the oil and gas bidness itself (Bushistas vs. Kochistas), and in its ties to central banking (between Anglo-Bush and Saxono-Koch alliances in banking) and liberal vs. conservative in politics. The Anglo-Bush folks seem to be getting a little impatient with the Saxono-Koch folks seeming inability to keep the state of Kansas and KU immune to the other Anglo complex of Anglo-Rockefeller-Mellon influences apparently trying to restore their legacy strength there. And, without putting too fine of a point on it, this tension between Texas and Kansas interests, that up until the Obama years had pretty much made Kansas a colony of Texas, now seems a little more tense and conflicted. I mean how would you feel if you had just invested heavy in tar sands and oil shale extraction and cracking it into bitumen to be pipelined to Texas, and to have invested in fracking from the Dakotas to Oklahoma to get the cheap gas needed to crack it, only to have the Anglo-Bush folks tell their Saudi partners to flood the world markets with cheap sweet crude waaaaay cheaper than anything you can crack and frack in North America right about now? So that's nasty burr between the Bushistas and the Kochistas. Then you've got the Anglo-Rockefeller-Mellon apparently driving harder into Kansas, and you've apparently got a real powder keg just below the surface in Kansas.
All of the above probably subtly colors the news down in Texas about how fit of a place Kansas and KU are to send your kids. If you're a liiberal Texan you figure Austin is liberal enough. If you're a conservative Texan, you figure Kansas may not be conservative enough right now and may not be aligned properly in the oil bidness either. And there is always that fault line buried deep between Texas and Kansas--slave state and free state. And there is a basic legacy geostrategic difference between Texas and Kansas if you ignore the mutual interests in the black gold and frack gas that folks often forget. Texas is its own electric grid. Kansas is part of the Western USA electric grid. Texas is always heavily oriented to being a transportation hub for the Caribbean basin with its own energy independent electric grid and very interocean canal and Super Corridor oriented. Kansas is always massively CONUS center point oriented. It always sees things through the eyes of being a rail and highway and flight hub to all of CONUS. Thus though Texas and Kansas can agree on many energy extraction and agricultural and religious issues, Kansas has a much different geostrategic agenda on transportation and electricity than Texas. Or so it seems to little old me looking on remotely.
The really deep burr between Texas and Kansas is that they are locked in a something of a zero sum game in the issues of transportation and electricity. What is good for Texas is usually NOT good for Kansas regarding these two issues, and so Texas has to curry favor with Kansas on issues of oil and agriculture, while Texas slowly inexorably tries to cut Kansas out of its center point influence in transportation by shifting the transit hub south and tries to take over the Western Electric grid, which in the long run will reduce Kansas even further into being a colony of Texas.
I suspect that oil policy right now is a very serious raw wound between the two states that has not yet openly ruptured, but soon could. And I suspect that conflict over oil policy was what brought President Obama to Kansas during basketball season. The Democrats and their base in Chicago, New York and so on, were looking to drive a little bit more of a wedge between Texas and Kansas, as Obama Prepared for a China Pivot that was going to do serious harm to the Bushistas efforts to open up the Tarim Basin in northwestern China, and so the Bushistas went to the Saudis and said something like open up the valves and we'll look the other way while you sell all you want. We are not talking conspiracy at all here. Just strategy and policy. And so Obama and his base said something like well, if you Saudi's will do the dirty work of the bombing missions in Yemen that all of my cruise missiles have failed to accomplish, we too will look the other way, while you sell all the cheap crude you want. And so Anglo Bush and Anglo Obama wind up getting what they want, and Anglo Obama eases up on provoking the Chinese, and Anglo Bush gets to keep moving forward on the Tarim Basin, and well, everyone is happy, except Saxono-Koch, which suddenly is holding the s-bag on a massive investment in North American tar sand and oil shale extracting, fracking and cracking infrastructure that suddenly doesn't pencil out.
And so, to get out of the vice grip of currently uneconomic tar sands/oil shale/cracking and fracking investment, the Anglo-Bushistas can offer to back off on the Saudi's flooding the world's markets with sweet crude, and in exchange it is likely that the Saxono-Kochistas will support Jeb Bush in the next election and all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well in the oil bidness and between the states of (and private oligarchies of) Kansas and Texas.
So: because this turbulent time too shall pass, long term the state of Kansas needs to remain constructively engaged with Texas and the south, as surely as it needs to stay constructively engaged with the North and East and West.
And so KU should remain constructively engaged with recruiting Texas basketball recruits, because not so far in the future, maybe only a year, the mass media will be putting out better vibes in Texas about Kansas than it probably has the last few years, and KU will probably begin to do better at signing these kids, Nike and adidas permitting, of course. And in time Texans will internalize the brain scanning results and steer more and more of their kids into hoops.
Oh, my, what a marvelously interconnected world.
Rock Chalk!
(Note: all of the above is speculation, opining and hypotheticals made by an old fan watching everything remotely and with no insider information. But be very, very VERY wary of oil industry experts and professionals responding on this sort of thing, because they have a rather poor record of predicting things and explaining things before hand for obvious reasons. Remember Peak Oil? HOWLING!!!! Remember fossil only origins? HOWLING!!!! And I never will forget a relative telling me the world was effectively out of oil and was never going to make any more great discoveries; this was in 1974. Ha!!!!)
Batredamus predicts Scott will not only reach Wilt, but KU bigs this season will start shooting the finger roll and the turn around fade away--the latter of which saves their legs muscles and energy for defense, since the fadeaway removes the need to jump.
Oligopoly pricing?
Thanks kD!!!!
50 Shades of Black and Gold—The Novel the BDSM Sports Community Has Been Flailing Itself Over Is Now a Major Motion Picturet!!!!
Its provocative. It pushes out the envelope on sports novels. Forget about Claire Bee’s Chip Hilton novels. Forget about Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries. This is the story of MU Antlers Max Inbredden and Chanticleer Foy self-flagelating to MU losses in SEC basketball while Amnesia Tin dominates Christopher Gold with a Tigger of Nine Tails. And that's just the beginning.
Tigger of Nine Tails? Group reading of Story of A (aka Story of Antler)? Golden Tiger Rain? Its all here. Its all hot. Its all Ozark Polymorphous Perverse.
Its turns Antlers into submissives begging for MU to be beaten by UK and LSU stacks, and for them to be flogged with whips and chains by Mike Anderson and his Razorbacks.
Plot: Amnesia Tin from Columbia, MO sees her life change drastically when she meets an independently rich Antler named Christopher Gold who takes her off to his meth lab in Cape Girardeau and introduces her into the BDSM scene underpinning the meth economy there. Before Amnesia knows it she is crowned The Meth Queen—the highest ranking femme domme in southeast Missouri. Soon she is disciplining not only Christopher, but the entire city of Cape Girardaeau and over 140 current and legacy Antlers.
The film adaptation is even hotter than the novel, according to Rotten Cumquats.com—the pre-production movie review website. The film, directed by Gram Failer-Jackson and starring Wyoming Jackson, Gamie Hornan,Genevieve Eel, and Elois Bumford, received 4 out of 5 flaming cumquats. High praise indeed.
The movie is available on NetFixFeeds and can be pirated through TidalBitWave downloads.
For those that still like to hold a book in one hand leaving the other free, Fifty Shades of Black and Gold can be ordered from Niger-KageraBooks.com.
(Note: All fiction. No malice. Ain’t it grand we don’t have to play them anymore. Free at last. Free at last. Thank god almighty, free at last!!!!)
Way to go, Joel!!!!!!!
Now, go out and make everyone forget about all the other slow footed centers clogging up the NBA. Become the center of the generation that you can become!!!!!
Many Americans grumble about how slow the pump price of gasoline falls, when the price of a barrel of oil falls sharply and fairly quickly, as it has since the Saudi's got down and dirty with both Putin's Russian Oilcos, and western energy companies trying to extract and refine tar sands and oil shale in North America with fracked coal gas in order to export it to help with our balance of payments and prepare for an oil shut off in the Middle East, because of our peripatetic regime change wars there.
But compared to basketball petroshoes and basketball petroapparel, pump gas prices seem positively elastic!!!!
Have Nike-Jordan, or Nike-Nike, or adidas, or Under Armour announced any significant price cuts at the retail shelf on their shoes, shirts, shorts, etc.? I haven't noticed any.
I mean there appears to be the usual bloated pricing at first followed by the "sales" that have become de rigeur in retail products the last 10-20 years.
But has anyone actually seen a significant fall off in the initial retail price of basketball shoes?
And don't lets do the old saw that most of the price of the shoe is in R&D and manufacturing and so on, because the PetroShoeCos reputedly have contracts with outfits in Indonesia and China to produce these "limousines for the feet" (remember that one?) with peonage labor rates depressed by slave labor supply keeping wages down, no bennies, minor environmental regs, record cheap borrowed money, microscopic container shipping rates, and R&D and marketing costs spread out over out over tens of millions of units world wide, and now rock bottom oil prices recently.
C'mon, PetroShoecos, cut us knuckle draggers some slack. Our real wages are going down still. How about cutting the prices on some shoes and jerseys?
Rock Chalk!!!
Self gave Norm a big pat on the back for landing Carlton Bragg.
Did anyone hear Self assign some luv to an assistant for Cheick?
In a two man recruiting class, if no one got any luv for Diallo, then does anyone know who has been striking out on Zimmerman, Ingram, Rabb, etc.?
Jerrance and Kurtis appear to have been looooooooow profile this recruiting season.
Bill Self will have fingers surgically added to his hands to wear simultaneously all of the conference title rings he wins.
Bruce Weber will suspend himself for not having attracted enough players to field a KSU team.
The KSU AD will reinstate Weber and then fire him for not having attracted enough players to field a KSU team.
Bruce Weber will stage a mock burial of himself, then join Steve Lavin and Gene Keady begging Cuonzo Martin to give them jobs.
Cuonzo will hire Bruce Weber, Steve Lavin and Gene Keady to break down game films for minimum wage; then Cal Berkeley will be the first ten stack to go winless.
Bruce Pearl will buy every starter on Auburn a fire arm and take them for a ride in a convertible to show them the way things used to be.
Bruce Pearl will also publish a new basketball book called the Austrian Offense to be published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute located at Auburn.
Fred Hoiberg will play The Tin Man in the up coming remake of The Wizard of Oz shot on location entirely inside a tornado. The film will be written, produced and directed by Rob Riggle. Busy Bruce Weber will play both The Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion. The scariest scene will be real genetically engineered flying monkeys terrorizing the live stock in the KSU Xperimental Barns.
Tyler Self will, after participating in a covert DARPA experiment, average 32 ppg and become a lottery pick, but decide instead to spend 7 years in Tibet learning to walk the razor’s edge and shave.
Scott Pollard will reveal that he and Self are building a seance club on Mass Street, where Scott will regularly take paying customers into a spirit world beyond the limit of life. The club will be called the Gustavus Myers Beyond the Limit Lounge. Women will fly for free.
(Note: all fiction. No malice. Rock on.)
These too were predicted today.
Agent activities will lack transparency until until a really big fish wants to come in and take over all the action; then there will be reform in name only.
Jordan shoes will split from Nike and Roy will coach till he is 104.
Adidas and Under Armour will merge into Adidas Armour
.
Victoria's Secret Will start a men's line called Victor's Secret supplying a line of knee lingerie and g-string jock straps.
John Calipari will begin selling used cars outside Rupp Arena.
Nike-Cuonzo will be the first coach with a 10 stack to win only .594 of his games at Nike-CalB.
(Note: all fiction. No malice.)
Howling!
This seems like an effective way for Adidas to overcome the asymmetric recruiting space somewhat.
Maybe we can trade LB and Janks one or two of our back up bigs for this guy!
@Statmachine
He was the Michaelangelo of dunks. Put his soul and strength into them. One was literally the Sistine Dunk!
@Statmachine
This seems like cannibalizing SMU for Adidas, unless L B has agreed to it. It also sounds like Adidas getting into the stacking thing.
Didn't Self talk about this returning group of perimeter players being one of his best, deepest and most experienced returning perimeter groups for awhile, if everyone came back? But didn't he suggest there was a possibility that everyone might not come back? And wasn't this said AFTER Oubre jumped?
So: I am wondering if anyone still thinks we might lose someone to transfer?
It doesn't seem likely to me, but I haven't been following this angle at all. I became too preoccupied with the recruiting.
Josh Pastner should always apologize to Tarik Black every time they happen to meet.
How Pastner kept Black from becoming a monster talent in D1 I will never understand.
If Self and Norm had him even 3 seasons the guy would have been a lottery pick.
He is just an amazing physical talent with an exceptional mind to go with the equipment.
I hope he just keeps progressing incrementally in the NBA and avoids severe injury and one day he will be an important piece of a championship team.
Thank you sooooooooo much for those pics. Makes my heart big as Texas!!!!
One of the things I remember so much about that team was a moment around mind season, when Tyshawn and TRob, who appeared VERY close as teammates, finally seemed to decide to let Jeff Withey into their inner circle. It was one of the most beautiful moments in college basketball that I can recall. Withey had been very soft for several years. He had been very slow to come a long and there was a lot of doubt going into the season that he would be able to hold up his end of the bargain as a starter. Sure he could have a block party, but would he be tough enough? Would he have someone's back, when the going got tough and the blue meanies were preying on Tyshawn and TRob. The first third to half of a season it was not clear that Tyshawn and TRob were going to have Jeff's back, or that he was going to be strong enough and tough enough to have theirs. But then Withey showed he had the right stuff in some very tough physical games and it was like there was a moment there where the big three came together and they all agreed to be brothers through the story. KY was always accepted, even though he was kind of an outside come recently aboard, because he just played so damned hard ALL THE TIME. The question was Jeff. It was obvious Jeff had exactly what the team needed in terms of pieces of a puzzle. But it was not clear that Tyshawn and Thomas could ever get beyond it being THEIR team, and letting it finally be all of their team. It was one of the most beautiful transitions to "team" and it carried them to the national finals. It was the quintessence of "team".
I will always believe that Self loved that team more than any other and that it reached farther beyond his expectations than any other he has had at KU.
That team routinely did amazing things that seemed beyond its capabilities.
Self put it well. It didn't really lose that National Final. It just ran out of time.
I would have put the '57 team Number 1, also, but I was just too damn young to really experience that season with the team. My older brother loved that team as much as you apparently do, so I can understand your passion for them. But I was talking about love and experience, and I just wasn't old enough to take it in. Any team with Wilt Chamberlain has to be counted as the best non champ I didn't get to see!!!! Rock Chalk!!!
@drgnslayr and @JayHawkFanToo,
Question 1: how could his point production not have started falling because with a torn labrum in his hip?
Question 2: how could his point production not have started falling when Self began to use him as a decoy, while the team began to play heavily through Perry Ellis?
Qutestion3: how could his point production not have fallen when Self cut back to ten 3ptas per game?
My point of course is that while all young players that begin to produce then get scouted and schemed against to take away their games, most young players take a few weeks or a month to work through the problem and resume effectiveness.
BG may have lost some scoring productivity for a few weeks or a month, because of the increased defensive attentions of opponents, but there really is no reason to thing that his long term decline in productivity was related to that. The much more probable drivers of the long term decline were the answers to Questions 1-3.
And it is for this reason that I am expecting him to have a very good season, if he can heal up, get his pop back, and be ready to rip by December 15.
Hell, I forgot Conner, too.
Those PLAYERS were just awesome together.
THE MIRACLE ON NAISMITH DRIVE!
Tyshawn, TRob, KY, what a three some.
I only wish Jeff and Travis had been in the pic, too.
It was one of the great "teams" ever.
I loved that team more than any other non-champion EVER.
Still do.
They are the only non champion team that I hold on the same pedestal as champions.
They were the greatest "team" that didn't win IMHO.
I so look forward to the day when they come back to the field house to be honored.
I.
Loved.
Them.
Good eye, thanks for posting that.
Shot creation is a complicated issue. It is a combination of a player's abilities, health and skills, plus the teammates he is operating with and the offensive role the coach assigns.
I am increasingly leery of doubting BG's ability to create his own shots.
First, because he was injured and his ability to create shots inside or out, but certainly outside, was sharply degraded by an operable injury that not only wrecked his mechanics but obviously in retrospect hampered his ability to get loose.
Second, because his perimeter teammates who were all hot early began to slump and the defenses increasingly over shifted to stop him, not realizing how hampered his shooting was. Give BG the kind of shooters around him that UW-Madison perimeter shooters had and Greene would be able to get loose much easier. There would be less help defense being played on him, etc.
Third, it is pretty clear in retrospect that Brannen was increasingly being used as a decoy outside, by Self. He was not supposed to create shots, but rather stay outside and stretch defenses. Self knew BG could not create shots with a tear in his hip, or at least with what ever degree of injury he played with, with or without Self knowing what the exact nature of the injury was.
Frankly, the more I reflect on how well BG was dribbling down the stretch of the season, when I doubted his ability to dribble under control at the start of the season, and when I factor in his 6-7 height and how degraded his mobility was much of the season, OMG! he is just going to be able to create his shot at will if he heals 100% and has matured neural nets. I mean the guy can shoot over a lot of defenders at the 3 in D1 without a lot of action. When Self devises some good actions for him, and he is healed up, he is probably going to become a draft choice.
Thanks for the link. I forgot about it being a tear instead of a spur.
There is a lot of optimism expressed by Dad and the docs, but...
"...Coach Bill Self said, "the rehab will be somewhat significant because he'll be on crutches for eight weeks and probably not return to the basketball court for approximately five months."..."--KUSports.com
It sounds like a very big rehab job.
That is about as subdued and conservative as I recall Self sounding in discussing a surgical rehab. Gulp.
Go, Brannen, go!!!!!!
Nothing is written.
On another thread there has been a theme that Brannen Greene is a bad fit for Self and a player with too many limitations to ever be more than a 15 minute man.
Even @REHawk has said that Brannen Greene and his father are taking a huge risk not transferring, as fellow non driving trey ballers AWIII and Conner Frankamp did.
Ooooh, I HATE taking another side than @REHawk, because The Coach has this thing of usually being right, and especially when ever I am on the other side of him.
Hmmm, how to approach this cleverly so that I do not wind up having to run wind sprints for a month about next January when @REHawk says, "bate, I told you so, son, now start running!"
(Pause while trying to find the right words.)
Well, everything everyone including me has said about BG is right to some degree.
His feet get tangled on defense, though that began to improve midway last season, before he began doing the Casper the Friendly ghost color shift, followed by showing suddenly changing shot dynamics including a frequent weird hop off one foot rather than his familiar perfect form.
It is also true that "The Man from Georgia" came with not one, but half a dozen wild hairs, but he was showing signs of the neural nets growing together last season and he was down to one wild hair, maybe even none by the end of the season.
He really is a deadly three point man, and playing through the injuries he did proves beyond doubt that he has Self grade toughness.
And its true that he really has not shown much sign of being able to drive the ball, BUT in his defense, he WAS playing with an operable hip injury at least the last half of the season and he DID show some signs of becoming a decent dribbler in transition and under pressure down the stretch, when his trey balling was reigned in because of his injury that Self never told us about till after the season.
(Note: when are we ever going to learn that when ever a talented player under performs for half a season that he is playing with an operable injury we will be told about after the season, or a regulatory problem we will never get an explanation for?)
So what am I trying to say here in a finesse move around The Coach, so that I don't have to do down and backs next December?
Well, first, at signing, and later in his first season, I recall (and @JayHawkFanToo will no doubt augment my increasingly crappy memory on the accuracy, or inaccuracy, of this recollection in due time, as his engineering duties permit) Self said Brannen was an "NBA type" player and would have been the star of a class had his class not had the other athletic freaks that signed the same year he did.
Second, if the guy was playing with an operable hip injury (bone spurs that hurt like hell once they accrete to a point they begin to make inappropriate contact with nerve fibers near by) and if he was changing colors like litmus paper, his energy, explosiveness, shot mechanics, defensive footwork, and ability to put it on the deck, had to have been degraded to some degree or another, and likely to considerable degree.
Third, all of these wild hair types that come to KU invariably lose the Wild Hair some time during their second or third seasons consistent with brain scanning research findings in neuroscience empirically verifying that adult brain development is not achieved on average until the age of 23. So: we have reason to believe that BG's brain meat, specifically its neural net burns, are likely to be very nearly completed in their developmental burns, given how much progress in this regard he showed this past season over his first.
These three points just enumerated lead me to think that BG could be set for a very, very good season, IF this bone spur operation results in no dramatic loss of pop, and if we give him two months, say, from October 15 to December 15, to work and play his way back into form. We cannot judge him by that first two months any more than we could judge Brandon Rush by that first two months of coming back from his knee injury. The only thing we want to see that first two months in BG is what we wanted to see in Brandon Rush--a general up trend in the restoration of his athleticism related to the location of the injury. Specifically, we want to see that hip and leg strengthen gradually and we want to see fewer and fewer signs of one legged hopping on his J due to asymmetry in leg strength and joint fitness. If we see this evolution during those first two months, then I believe we have a strong possibility of finally having one helluva player named Brannen Greene in crimson and blue.
Some dishes cook quickly.
Other dishes take time come together.
But its pretty clear to me that the man from Georgia had earned the respect and trust of Coach Self by January last season, before he started doing the Casper thing and hopping one footed on his trifecta, shortly after. He is always going to be the kind of player Self can hatch an embolism over. Great coaches are control freaks and great shooters are operating on a level of perception and response that even great coaches cannot accurately monitor. But don't mistake Self's forehead palming for lack of love for Brannen and his classically beautiful trifecta, or for his lack of conscience. Great coaches know that great shooters operate in borderline sociopathic states on the wood, when the basket rim goes through the alchemy of psychic enlargement to the diameter of a grain silo, and the ball shrinks in the great shooters hands to the size of a magnetized pea drawn inevitably to the silo regardless of where one is in half court and regardless of who is guarding one.
And I am increasingly of the mind that Self's decision to pull back from the three point game had a lot to do with Brannen Greene's deteriorating him condition and ability to square up and shoot off a symmetric, two-footed jump from outside.
Brannen Greene appeared pre-injury and shade changing to be our very best three point shooter last season. He was the one triafectate perimeter player on our team--outside perhaps Mason--that Self had reason to bet the farm he would be able to keep gunning it at 40% to end of the season. And he did even with his injury and shade changing.
But I believe Self has been a bit misunderstood about his comments and decisions regarding trey balling and its role in KU's offense last season.
During post season reflection, I have come to think that Self's anti-three point doctrine came in two rational steps.
The first step came when he called three point shooting fools gold, immediately after he had turned his team loose shooting them and they destroyed opponents with the trey and showed they could burn down Allen Field House and road venues from outside. This pronouncement came, as I recall, early in the second half of the season. What I now infer was going on at that point was that Self had used the three ball weapon to get an early lead in the B12 against some tough teams, and then decided to force his team to go back to work on developing a means of scoring inside via learning to drive it from all positions, since as Self said we didn't have back to basket scorers inside. In short, Self was doing the entirely sensible thing of trying to find a way for his team to win games on cold trey balling nights. He figured he had created some breathing room for the team in the conference race, and he could spend a few games working on a new approach of drive ball and Mobile Big Man Attack Platforms--specifically developing Perry as a stretch 4--so that when his pair of reliable outside shooters--Mason and Greene--blew cold, the team could still find a way to win. This hardly seems anything but sound. Plus Self had some streaky three ballers in Devonte and Wayne that he could not depend on, but that could add trey icing on certain nights. And it remained to be seen if Perry could keep shooting 40% if his 3ptas were upped to several a game. So Self popped the fan's team's bubble and the fan's bubble too about trey balling, to buy him some time to have the team practice drive ball with far fewer 3ptas. And frankly, it worked. They kept winning. And Self was probably on track to reverting to a more balanced attack, when the team's first collective trey slump began to set in. Whether or not Self's pronouncement caused the slump, which I doubt, or it was just this team's time to slump, which is the statistically probable inference, this slump force Self to try the trey ballers each game early and then pull back and win the game on the drive so to speak. But the key point is that Self kept trying the trey ballers early each game to see if anyone was breaking out. No one was. So the drive ball continued and board rats like @HighEliteMajor and myself, and increasingly others, began to advocate for more trey balling rather than less, and shooting out of the slump, rather than waiting for it to pass in this deliberate wait and see approach. Self of course opted for not taking losses by shooting out of the slump, but rather keep trying to eek out wins by testing the trey balling early, then resorting to drive ball of the kind that was successful for UW-Madison and Bo Ryan, when Bo's boys blew cold from trey.
But then Brannen came up lame: first with the litmus test color changes, then with the weird asymmetric hop in his three point mechanics. Self had to have known fairly quickly, despite him saying BG kept it to himself, that BG was now among the walking wounded, as Wayne Selden had been the previous season, and as Tyrel Reed and EJ and Travis had been in prior seasons. Walking wounded means guys crucial to the rotation that you have to play even though they can't keep performing optimally, or at times even very well. Walking wounded have to be schemed around. You need them for their size, athleticism, experience, and some aspect of their game, like defense, or long balling, or what have you. And you need to conceal as much as possible from opponents what they can no longer do well. In Brannen's case, KU desperately needed opponents to believe that BG was a threat from three, because KU had NO inside back to the basket game, and was growing increasingly dependent on driving from all positions masked by varying High Low Passing Offense formations.
When BG came up lame in the hip, i.e., when his hip was likely Xrayed and scanned and revealed bone spurs, Self knew then and there that his best three point shooter was walking wounded and that the team really could not rely on the three point shot as its bread and butter, or even knock out weapon of choice, even though it had developed its drive ball game for cold nights sufficiently to go back to a more balanced attack.
Self was down to Frank Mason on the outside. Perry was doing well, but the better he was doing the more the opponents were roughing him up and taking away either his trey, or his drive, and beating him up even more. Without Frank AND Brannen making treys, and without both to stretch defenses, that meant the middle was going to clog up increasingly for Perry.
It was at this point that everyone in the fan base and the media began advocacy of more trey balling, even as other teams began imitating what Self was doing, which was itself based on Bo's Drive Ball up at UW, when their trey balling dried up. But Bo had all his trey shooters in good trey shooting form and, well, Bill's two primary trey ballers--Frank and Brannen--were getting bad wheels. Franks knees were wrapped in lingerie and he was obviously incrementally losing his explosiveness, which would sooner or later hamper his trey balling. The pictures probably confirmed Brannen had bone spurs and would not quit hopping on one foot that season.
Then Perry injured his knee and things went from dark to lights out black, or so it seemed.
So: Self sized up the dire situation the team faced the last few weeks of the conference season and conference tournament and did something that only basketball geniuses would ever think of, something completely counter intuitive, something so unexpected that opposing coaches couldn't really figure understand until after they had been had by it. He took drive ball and extrapolated it into what I came to call BAD BALL Bad Ball dispensed almost entirely with the trey ball. Bad Ball, which I do not need to go into in detail here yet again, was based using constantly reduced impact space on both ends of the floor to disrupt flow on both ends and in transition in low possession games to the point that opponents could never stay in a rhythm, or achieve a run. Neither could KU, but the unique bunch of personalities that composed the KU rotation turned out to be perfect for playing BAD BALL end to end for 40 minutes. And so despite being down to one, or no, trey ballers, despite having no back to the basket game, despite both Landen and Traylor being so banged up that neither could clear the floor much less explode out of position, despite losing his team's star stretch-4 and then having to play him in a heavily degraded condition, and having to play several good teams down the stretch, the team miraculously managed to play .500 ball AND hang on to the lead in the conference race it had built when healthy, and won an eleventh straight conference title, something frankly almost unthinkable in retrospect.
I think Bad Ball is going to be a tool that remains in KU's quiver, but I do not now think that KU will play this way full time next season, unless another tide of injuries swamps the team as it did last season.
I believe we will see more trey balling than we saw last season, if Brannen heals and becomes the player I think he can be. I think we will see many more minutes of conventionally effective High Low Passing Offense that has worked well for Self in the past, that worked well for Larry Brown at SMU last season, and that frankly works well for everyone that has the pieces to use it.
But if Brannen loses all the game he was amassing before sickness and injury took him from us, and if Frank runs into wheel problems and lost pop from wear and tear, and Svi can't find his Ukrainean Rifle, and Bragg and Diallo turn out to need a year to develop post defense and back to basket offense, then I reckon we will see an entire season of BAD BALL, because it works and can be developed further.
Rock Chalk!!!!
The coach weigheth in.
Thx for the good thoughts.
First Big Shoe.
Next Big Agent? :-)
There is a long legacy between talent and agents across all professions that act in fields that drift wholly, or partly into the "entertainment" bidness.
The agent industry, and its interfacing alter ego, PR/advertising are reputedly pretty slick in the music business and the movie industry. Some have kind of unsavory reputations. But every profession has some members with unsavory reputations.
I would like to learn something about the agent-PR complex. I haven’t read any books focused on it yet. Maybe some on KUBuckets.com can fill me on some good ones.
The agent-PR complex is in the business of image management and marketing. To do that effectively, the agent-PR complex has to deal not only with the business of celebrities (client's professional work contracts, plus client's endorsement deals), but also their peccadilloes. These are areas that unfortunately occasionally involve the less savory aspects of life from time to time. Players are human just like musicians, movie stars and leading political figures. They make mistakes that have to be managed to minimize the damage to their careers.
Consider the agent-PR complex's jobs of negotiating professional work contracts and endorsement deals. They occur in a world of entertainment. The world of entertainment, though it seems rather glamorous to us today, because it has invested heavily in sprucing up its image, has a long seedy legacy tracking back to the old notion of "show folk” over many centuries. Show folk ranged from traveling acting troops, to musicians, to magicians, to carnival performers, to circus performers. I reckon they all grew out of a tradition of magical, pretend entertainment for poor folk, or for a few at the high end in the king’s court. The show folk brought not only entertainment, but knowledge of the outside world and some vices to the locals where they performed.
Overtime agents and talent agencies and booking agencies emerged to find and channel talent to those producing the magic shows, plays, musicals, bands, etc. Entertainment for many centuries was a small time, carney-like business with so-so margins from the gate that had always had to involve itself in sideline activities to make ends meet. As cities grew in size venues like theaters and opera houses grew in size and proliferated. Celebrities began to be a phenomenon. But it was later with the industrial age and now the digital age that it became highly profitable to be a star in some realms (e.g., movies, recorded music and/or large venue rock and orchestral concerts, TV, internet).
Sports are a fascinating subset of entertainment. Even in classical antiquity, sports could draw huge crowds (e.g., the Coliseum and Circus Maximus in Rome) and become spectacles in huge stadia. But modern sports, including basketball, began to attract large stadia crowds in the industrial age and then huge remote viewerships through radio, then TV and now the internet. So: sports, like basketball have always had an entertainment component, but modern media and modern public relations and advertising have elevated the entertainment aspects of sports.
Interestingly, there is another side of early entertainment that is often not discussed that adds some to its shady legacy: intelligence gathering. Entertainers have long been a group of persons engaged in an activity that traveled around the interior of states, and across state boundaries with very little state regulation. Further, entertainment has always had a sizeable component of illusionists by training. Actors and magicians are performers that create illusions to entertain people. They were traditionally very transient. They traditionally not only played roles on stage, but also tended to create new, more marketable identities for themselves off stage. This tolerance for illusion in the entertainment industry has long ago made it okay for persons to change their names, to reinvent their pasts, and so on. The tradition continues to this day.
This group of "show folk" often with largely untraceable pasts and often moving fairly freely among regions and among states where formal officials of governments and corporations may not be able to move freely, and where formal intelligence operatives may not be able to operate, has long been an ideal supply of potential informants for intelligence organizations to recruit from. Its been that way for many centuries. Harry Houdini, the great magician who was invited to put on shows all over the world, was reputedly an informant from time to time for American and British intelligence. John Wilkes Booth was reputedly one of many "show folk" used as informants during the US Civil War by both sides long before he reputedly decided to assassinate Abraham Lincoln in Ford's Theater as part of a sizable conspiracy. And magicians of course attract their share of occult types into the profession of magicians and certain of these occult types in the long history of entertainment have also straddled the worlds of the occult and intelligence.
Certain categories of performance in entertainment have also reputedly attracted intelligence organizations. Mesmerizing people grew out of the occult and out of entertainment. Mesmerizing became hypnosis. Hypnosis was an early form of mind control—a skillful, controlled planting of suggestions. Also hypnosis could relax a subject into being willing to reveal things about themselves that they might not reveal without hypnosis. Skillful hypnotists and magicians could create illusions and extract information from their subjects. Same with fortune tellers. Fortune telling is another facet of the occult and of early entertainment. Fortune tellers could bring subjects into dramatic seances and elicit all kinds of information from them in seances that could not be gotten other ways. And those in the intelligence rackets have long recruited informants and spies from these fields precisely because of their potential access to information from certain persons.
My point here is that the entertainment field ranges from "show folk” that are legitimate performing artists, to con artists and everywhere in between. And across this spectrum from time to time intelligence organizations make appeals for assistance in gathering intelligence that entertainers from time to time comply with. Throw in the occasional spy posing as an occult shaman that also performs and you get an idea of the wide, occasionally bizarre range of entertainers that agents and PR firms have to deal with.
As a result, agents, PR types and booking organizations, quite literally have been for a long, long, looooooong time involved representing not only the nice conventional artist craftsmen in the entertainment bidness, but also the con artists, occult weirdoes, and spooks, too. Thus it should not surprise that perhaps a few agents and agencies could themselves become partially, or completely, drawn into these unconventional activities.
Now, if you fast forward to the present day, when show folk have become admired, even worshipped entertainers and artists and producers and distributors in a vastly profitable complex of entertainment industries, and when their value as product endorsers (i.e. merchandize movers) has sky rocketed along with their stardom and cultural esteem, you can see that agencies and PR firms have moved up town right along with these former show folk in their outward trappings and in the amounts of monies they make from doing their age old jobs and taking their age old cuts.
But somethings never change in the entertainment business.
Work contracts have to be negotiated.
Clients images have to managed and marketed.
Their peccadilloes that occasionally surface in the eyes of the law, or tabloid dumpster searchers, have to be "handled."
And, though I have no specific proof to point to, right now, by extrapolating past to present, it seems reasonable to suspect that given the vast range and access to upper levels of society that many entertainers achieve, that some act as informants and spooks from time to time for the intel world.
And of course we know in the current age of full spectrum dominance that all branches of the military ARE budgeted funds to pay for the production of movie, TV and internet content that some how serves the interests of those particular branches of our military, which have as their purpose the maintenance of our national security. This at least suggests that the entertainment industry may be more involved with the military and intelligence worlds now than at any other time in our history save maybe during World War II.
And if the enterntainment industry is more involved than ever in this sort of national security related content production, then we can assume that lots of talent and their agents and PR representatives are in on this gravy train, too.
All of which brings me to my hypothesis that there is a PetroShoeCo-Agent complex that has for probably a wide variety of legacy and emerging reasons gotten itself involved in recruiting for the greatest game ever invented.
The agent element of the complex has so far been covered in a rather sketchy way. We don’t really have recent indications of agents being anything but honorable professionals helping young men negotiate employment contracts and endorsement deals. At the same time, I don’t recall any recent investigative reporting of what they do for high school, college and professional basketball players and how they do it. As a fan, the world of agents and agent runners remains not very transparent.
As I have mentioned a time or two before, it would be nice if some professional sports journalists would dig in to the world of sports agents and public relations persons for basketball players and give fans an understanding of what is going on.
I wonder if agents that handle basketball players are some of the same agents that handle rock stars, or movie stars, or what have you.
Or are they separate segment of professional agents that only handle athletes.
Some of the agents and PR firms and talent booking firms that handle rock musicians and movie stars are reputedly stellar folks. But others have reputedly had some rather unsavory connections.
So: hey, pro sports journalists, how about a few new books on sports agents and public relations firms serving basketball players? Show us what they do and how they do it and if they are keeping their noses clean, or not.
Rock Chalk!
HOWLING!
"Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is"
--music and lyrics by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, definitive cover by Peggy Lee
@KansasComet indicated a day or so ago that the recruiting was not over, and while he got me juiced by saying so, I am starting to wonder if the signings may not be over.
It seems so quiet.
And after taking some small satisfaction in UK losing out on reputedly 5 recruits it has gone hard after in the late going, the bottom line is that UK is still going to have quite a stack going into next season. Without putting too fine a point on it, UK, even after an "off" recruiting year in which @konkeyDong speculates that days of 10 stacks at UK have broken, I am coming back to earth and noting that KU is going to have 1 reputed borderline OAD (Diallo), 1 four or five star recruit (Bragg), and one former OAD turned into a 3AD (Selden), 1 fourth year five star (Ellis), and a one time reputed foreign phenom that did not make the transition very well (Svi).
Compare this with UK on an "off" season: 2 OADs, 2 four star TAD type recruits, and however many TADs and 3ADs, like Tyler, Dakari and Pothyress, and so on return. It seems fair to say UK after an "off" recruiting season will have more total draft choices than it had when it won the ring in 2012, plus a lot more than KU has as usual.
At worst, UK is a 6-7 stack, maybe even an 8 stack.
Did I say it was an "off" recruiting season for UK?
What was it Mark Twain said? Reports of my death are premature.
Reports of the UK talent vampire having a stake driven through its heart appear premature.
I hardly think the stacking hypothesis should consider itself in retreat with UK having "only 6-8 draft choices.
It was not a repeat of last season for sure, but all is not yet well in NCAA recruiting down around the Cumberland Mountains.
And the mysterious last minute, out of the blue signing of true OAD Jaylen Brown by Nike-Cal and Nike-Cuonzo is sufficiently anomalous to trigger me into a wait and see period of reflection and analysis to understand the meanings there.
One notices that Nike-Cuonzo, in his second season at Cal, now has OAD Brown and OAD-to-2AD Rabb to go along with some 4 stars signings, especially that conspicuous one out of Oklahoma City named Tyler Jolly, plus footer Kingley Okoruh, plus footer Cameron Rooks, plus a wad of lesser talent.
Notice that Nike-Cuonzo, descended from the Gene Keady Okie Baller school, was .598 at Missouri State, then .606 at UTenn, and then .545 at Cal, and so is .594 overall.
Does anyone else find it striking that monster talent Jaylen Brown of Marietta GA took it all in for a full recruiting season and after reputedly saying he planned to play for an adidas program because of his long term relationships with adidas, at the last moment concluded more or less that when you are a pro type player it really doesn't matter where you go for a year; that you could go to University of Alaska for a season, and that when it all comes down to it he just loved Nike-Cal and Nike-Cuonzo?
Well,, I noticed @DoubleDD did and @konkeyDong said he did not foresee it. But I mean did anyone in the professional sporting media and the recruiting experts with budgets to look into such things notice it and write a piece that interviewed Brown about it and so explained it understandably?
Somehow I am not ready to infer much about the Brown signing with Nike-Cuonzo.
I am in wait and see mode.
I do notice that Mr. .594 without a ring or a confernce title Nike-Cuonzo has two footers, plus OADs Rabb and Brown and Mr. .82 with 11 titles and one ring adidas Bill does not.
Now I know that Bill has been very generous to a number of Okie Baller coaches over the years, but even I cannot believe that Coach Self said, oh, what the heck, let's make sure ol Cuonzo gets off to a good start in Berkeley--let's send him Brown and Rabb to go with the footers, so he can bring Okie ball to the Pac 12.
There is a fault line under the UC campus.
it will be interesting to see whether it moves or not.
In the end, I am left to put on my old Peggy Lee down load and break out the booze.
Wiggins is the real thing IMHO.
Forget everything about his season at KU. It meant little. It was significantly about merchandize protection.
What happened this season in the NBA was the first real season of basketball he has ever played IMHO. As such, it was not bad. You really can't compare Wigs to any of the previous ROYs, because it has taken a long time for the players and their managers to figure out just how little top OADs should give in their token D1 seasons in order to preserve their pop and hold down wear and tear.
In my memory, Carl Henry was really the first one to truly understand this process and he doesn't get credit for it, because viewed through the internet and pro journalist filtering, Carl appears to come off like a jerk. I am not saying he is, or isn't a jerk. I am saying he was the first that I recall to have really played this game the right way, and any pioneer bucking traditions and fan expectations always gets portrayed as a jerk whether they are or not. Curt Flood was reviled for challenging free agency during and after. But now we take it for granted that he was right to have done so. Carl Henry might be a jerk. I just don't know. But it doesn't matter, because the way he appeared to play the game was how it increasingly appears to be being played. There were no OADs at UK, or Duke this past season, that appeared to be playing 100% most of the season to me.
But think a little more on this. Everything Andrew and his dad appeared to do appeared built on the model Carl and Xavier developed. Carl had played the game at KU and apparently understood how much wear and tear there was on a college player's body, when that player was getting paid in room, board and tuition, i.e., only a small amount of what he would be earning in the NBA. Carl just put two and two together and apparently reasoned, "Nope, this is a business for the universities, and a business for the NBA, so its a business for my son. He is a professional, whether they make him play a season in D1, or not." (Note: the quote is poetic license at dramatizing the concept of the situation. Carl did not say these things to my knowledge. I do not call him Carl out of either disrespect, or personal familiarity with him. I use his first name because it became kind of a convention of referring to him during that year. I do not know Mr. Henry well enough to say for sure that I respect him, but I can say with some 20/20 hind sight that I think he was a smart man who analyzed the situation correctly, did right for his son, and pioneered a path that others have begun to follow; that seems pretty high praise.)
Carl Henry apparently rightly reasoned the university was paying his son a modest amount, so as professionals in all professions do--they give you whatever you pay for--so Carl apparently rightly reasoned again: my son is going to give you an amount equivalent to what you pay. If you pay a little, then you get the professional minimum. So: Xavier apparently took few physical risks playing the game, and was willing to play good defense, work on his rebounding, and take the open look outside shot, which he made 40% of for KU. But mostly driving the iron and diving for 50/50 balls was not part of the deal. The point of a year in D1 was reduced to hard logic. Show well in a few nationally televised contests. Have a stat builder game against an easy match up. Be a good teammate. Play tough defense. Show off your J. BUT DO NOT GET INJURED BY TAKING UNNECESSARY RISKS. And it worked out good for KU and for Xavier, even though he did not appear to play very close to what it appeared he was capable of doing. KU got a solid defender, a gifted shooter, and a guy who learned to rebound against the blue meanies without taking a lot of nasty shots. He left KU in great shape to be drafted. That he got injured in the NBA is just one of those things that can happen. The same thing could have happened at KU. Nothings for certain among professionals. You manage risk as well as you can. But professionals know there will be bumps in the road.
Fast forward to Andrew Wiggins. Father Wiggins had played in the NBA and apparently learned the same thing Carl had learned at KU. The body is the merchandise and the body has to be protected at all costs. The OAD season is a season, where you play inside your envelope to make as probable as possible that you get to draft day intact. No risks. A few stat builder days against easy matchups and stay on cruise control. If you're a great one, you can do this and still be better than your backup and most of your opponents most days.
But most OADs, as late as super center Anthony Davis at UK, were still playing balls to the walls their first seasons.
But then Nerlen Noels came a long and the next consensus Number 1 draft choice blew a knee.
That was the end of OADs playing hard, IMHO, for as long as there is an OAD rule. Everyone started looking to the Wiggins model. Time passes so fast they all probably don't even recall that Carl Henry and Xavier pioneered this path.
IT NOW APPEARS THAT EVERY OAD THAT COMES TO COLLEGE IS BEING COACHED BY HIS POSSE TO PROTECT THE MERCHANDISE.
It is a tough thing to ask players to do. Players like to play hard. They do it instinctively, unless they are trained extensively not to. And there are not surprisingly some OADs that turn out not good enough to actually attract the interest of NBA GMs playing only 3/4 speed. The OAD has to be a total athletic freak to really play 3/4 speed and show that he can help a team and be able to hang in at D1 speeds and levels of violence. Remember, even Andrew Wiggins went through a stretch where the blue meanies of B12 ball were just punching him in the face for kicks, because they knew he was protecting the merchandize, and only occasionally looking to air it out and dunk on them. Fortunately, Andrew was well trained.
In fact, again IMHO, I think Andrew is sooooo good that I don't think you will really see Andrew show his full game, until after he signs his second pro contract.
Father Wiggins apparently understands that the NBA is just as big of a racket in some ways as the NCAA is in its own way. The first three year contract in the NBA a guy like Andrew Wiggins--a reputed once in a decade player--is being massively underpaid. He is laboring in an minor media market. No matter how great he plays in Minneapolis, it will not be the same as if he were doing it in Chicago, NY, or LA. Father Wiggins had to have studied Lebron and learned how much wear and tear they put on top rookies like Lebron in minor markets those first three seasons. Father Wiggins had to have understood that the real money starts the fourth season, both in NBA salary but also in endorsement deals. Thus, as a basketball man, who knows what it takes to play in the NBA, and understands exactly what his son can and cannot do, Father Wiggins is in a pretty darned good position to know just how far Andrew can play 3/4 speed and protect the merchandize. He probably understands that if Andrew can 3/4 speed it to year four, then the Brinks trucks will start coming on a steady basis, and after that, its up to his uber talented son how much he wants put himself at risk the rest of his career. If he wants to be arthritic at 50 its up to him, but I wouldn't be surprised if Father Wiggins, whose joints are probably starting to get a little achy may say something like, well, Andrew, its up to you how much you want to sacrifice your body, but with the kind of money you are making and are going to have to spend when you are my age, well, it would feel pretty good to feel pretty good, when you are spending it, instead, of taking a lot of anti inflams and taking 2-3 hours of loosening up to feel good, as I have to do.
There is a basic professional calculus that is not being stated most of the time in talk about NCAA and NBA basketball. It was most eloquently stated in a western movie called El Dorado by Howard Hawks and starring John Wayne playing the fastest hired gun in the business. Early in the movie, John has been hired as a gun by a villain, who wants Wayne to go up against a sheriff played by Robert Mitchum. Mitchum is both a friend and maybe close to as fast of a gun as Wayne. Wayne tells the villain played by Ed Asner, he has decided not to take the job. Asner playing Bart Jason and Wayne playing Cole Thornton get into a short, terse exchange that distills professionalism almost entirely to its essence.
Bart Jason: Since when did hired guns get choosy? You're paid to take...
Cole: I'm paid to risk my neck. I'll decide where and when I'll do it. This isn't it.
Bart Jason: Ya know, Thornton, I got an idea you just don't want to go up against Sheriff J.P. Harrah.
Cole: You know, you're just about right?
Bart Jason: You think he's that good?
Cole: I tell ya he's that good.
This exchange is more subtle and complex than it seems. Unsaid is that Jason isn't paying him enough, and maybe couldn't pay him enough to take the risk against a gunman he knows and likes. At the same time, Thornton (Wayne) isn't really being honest about his own estimation of his capabilities. Thornton knows he is the best there is and that he could probably take the Mitchum character in a gun fight. But being a professional, his choices are not made based solely on what he is capable of. They are based on the pay off and what the client can be counted on for doing in the face of the unexpected, and on the level of risk the job involves. In gunfighting, it doesn't matter if you kill the Mitchum character 7 out of ten times, because three out of ten times you are dead even though you are the better professional.
Andrew Wiggins is a professional basketball player, same as Cole Thornton was a professional gunman.
It doesn't matter if playing balls to the walls would make him come out better on the VORP statistic. Andrew is a professional playing the game for money, and in Andrew's case, just about the highest stakes possible. There was no reason in the world for him to play hard at KU, because he had so much talent that he was going to be selected first playing 75% capacity no matter what. Only an injury could jeopardize it.
Similarly, there is no reason in the world for Andrew to play all out and take big risks in the NBA, if he can get by playing 80-85% percent for the next three seasons, before he signs his second contract. All he needs to do, as a professional, is turn it on down the stretch of the third season and give the NBA GMs a taste of what he could do when they really open up the purse strings for him.
This is business among professionals. All professionals are selling their time. They sell it as profitably and as risk-managed as they can. Most professionals are not so superior that they can do anything but go all out. But even they never give more than what the pay justifies.
The NBA and NCAA have created this situation with the OADs.
They deserve to be exploited as much as possible.
In the final analysis, only massive exploitation by the OADs of the NCAA and NBA will get the NBA and NCAA to change the rule.
So: in final answer to your question "is Andrew Wiggins really good?" I would say, so far, we have strong reason to believe so. But if he isn't, he is still doing the right thing for his business career given the crazy economic ineffiencies built into the OAD rule."
Its the NBA's and NCAA's own damn faults.
Its just a business now.
(Note: let me make as clear as possible that I am only speculating and opining about appearances about how the Henrys and the Wiggins approached their KU and NBA careers. They might all say that Xavier and Andrew played at 10/10s of their envelopes and I would be happy to believe them. All I can say is that it appeared to this fan watching on TV, and without insider knowledge that something less than 10/10s appeared to have been being given. And though I am old fashioned enough to miss the old days, when even the best players appeared to give it their all, I am perfectly happy to change with the times [until the rules can be changed] and with what KU received and in retrospect find no fault with either player's contributions to The Legacy given the circumstances. We are privileged to have had the and The Legacy is better for having had them. And I hope they feel they are better for having been with KU, even though it seems fair to say they might have made more money without the OAD rule. Rock Chalk Xavier and Andrew.)
Thanks so much for posting Shake It Off. I had lost track of Taylor Swift and she made me shake it off with this vid. That is the first really terrific new song I've heard in the last year. Did she write it? She used to write some good stuff. Awesome piece of work on her part.
The Sharm!!!!!!!
Caddy Cheick!!!!!
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There is always time for Cheika Khan...Cheicka Khan-Cheicka Khan!
Hypothetically speaking, in a metaphysical land, if after a MetaShoeCo 6-10 stacked a meta basketball program for 4 meta seasons and only came up with 1 meta ring from that meta program, while nine stacking another meta basketball program only one season and coming up with a ring, the Metashoeco might consult a statistician, or better yet, an odds maker, to find a better way to achieve full spectrum dominance in the Final Four. In this metaphysical land, it is quite likely that the meta odds maker named Benny the Numbers, would quickly advise hedging. Meta Rock Chalk!
@drgnslayr said:
to have a real rebounder again?!
Dear X-Axis Time Traveler. My name is Basketball Eloi. This is A.D.802,701. I live on a frugivorous diet of ESPN basketball via the internet jacked fiberoptically into my forehead while I sleep and 24/7 I receive calming microwaves from our god FEMACOG. I am protected from disease, hostile CBW agents, and unprogrammed reproduction by constant exposure to aerosol spraying by unmarked white objects flying high in our blue sky. I have been re-educated digitally for several seasons to accept my circumstances of fan dumb in our Edenic virtual sports reality happily and peacefully. What is rebounding?
:-)
Psy-Ops.
Counter Psy-Ops.
I am making this up.
But I just Cheicked ESPN and they don't have it posted that Brown has signed anywhere.
And ESPN is always quick to report any news adverse to KU's interest. :-)
OMG!