@Lulufulu
Self pulled out this formation the first game after the ISU loss. Its Fred Ball. He has been running it in various situations. So far he as tried starting out in the formation, tried waiting till the first substitution at 5 minutes in, tried waiting to ten minutes in, and tried starting the second half with it, and tried waiting 5 minutes into the second half.
I have also seen him start out in a three out and 2 on the lower blocks formation and have both posts run out to two feet beyond the elbows, with the usual perimeter three creating a 1-4 with no one low. And I have seen them start out in this 1-4. And I have seen them start out in the 1-4 and then fall back into 3-2 on the lower blocks. And I have seen them start out 1-4 and only drop one to the lower block and be in traditional high low formation.
It may not be readily apparent to board rats, but Self is showing opponents a ton of formations and shifts of formation BEFORE any action is run. The objective is to impair recognition of what we are about to run.
Once Self acknowleged secretly, apparently after the ISU loss, that KU is not strong enough inside to play inside out consistently; that KU is an outside in team; that will be playing mostly outside in to build leads, and then a mixture of inside out and outside in to defend leads, masking and compensating for what we were doing became paramount. (Note: he acknowledged this openly in a short hand after the KSU game, when he admitted we were more of an outside in team and so had to attack with Perry from outside. If we attack the inside with Perry starting from outside, as what I have called a MBMAP, you are not letting them over guard the perimeter, but at the same time acknowledging that B2B scoring the low blocks is often not in our ability set.)
The problem that Self is addressing with all of this masking is once you admit to yourself that you cannot play inside out consistently, then the opponent knows this, too, and how do you keep him from overplaying your outside shooting, and driving your trey attempts 2-3 deeper with the concomitant 5-10% drop in trey accuracy with each foot farther out that you shoot the trey?
One thing you can do to keep the defense honest is to attack the rim from outside with your bigs on cuts and on drives to iron.
Self prefers passing and dribble-driving to move, collapse and expand defenses (both man and zone) to create the space for shots, rather than running action, which he apparently thinks tends to create congestion, especially when run against good defensive teams one eventually faces sooner or later. It is sound logic, and it generally works, when your guys learn how to do it. But it is a headier game to play it Self's way, because the passer has to read the positions of the defense and make not just any pass, but THE pass that forces desirable deformation of the defense, and that varies moment to moment. So: you need players that can read the positioning of opponents and anticipate the effects of a pass in a second, or two. (Note: many new players lack this knack and take awhile to develop it. Devonte Graham stands out as a freshman, because he just seems to intuit where the ball can and should go next. Brady Morningstar could do it his first season. EJ and Travis could not. Oubre took awhile, but has gotten it down. Cliff still seems to be struggling a lot not so much with the logical pass, but with where to move to to receive a pass that deforms the defense in a way favorable for him to make a play.)
What frustrates fans so much is when Self's Carolina passing offense, which is really what the high-low that Self runs actually is, bogs down into just the ball being whipped around the perimeter. No open shots are being created.
Note: originally the "high-low" was a 3 out, 2 in, passing offense with two rotating postmen developed by Iba for the '64 Olympic team to be easily learned in a hurry. Brown, who was Iba's point guard on that Olympic team, saw the two brilliant innovations of relying on passing and driving/cutting instead of timed screening action to create space for shots, and the idea of two rotating post men instead of one, and took it to Dean Smith. Dean, who had been running Bruce Drake's timed Oklahoma Shuffle that Dean had learned from the head coach at Airforce, where he assisted, agreed with LB that Iba had come up with a better mouse trap. Brown became Smith's assistant. Smith and Brown added more emphasis on the passing and dribble driving, eliminated the weaves Iba had kept using, and added pieces of action from the Oklahoma Shuffle that could be called when a quick, predictable open shot was needed, and renamed it from High-Low to the Carolina Passing Offense.
Dean and LB loved this offense, because with two good rebounding post men you could release three on fast break most possessions, and this fed into Smith's connection to Phog Allen's legacy predilection for fast breaking. Smith and Brown also liked it because the initial 3 out 2 in formation could unexpectedly be efficiently expanded into what would become Smith's Four Corner offense, a slightly collapsed version of which Self has started showing frequently the last three games any time the lead hits 10-15 in the second half. Brown particularly liked the four corner to let the guard drive. Smith and Brown also liked the 3 out 2 in (some call it 1-2-2) and the four corner, because the absence of a timed, set offense of running through a series of running actions did not have to be switched on and off for a coach to improvise plays in the huddle--something Brown became famous for doing. Players always went to the same places on the floor, and so Brown drew up the plays for those guys to run out of those positions.
What Self runs is the Carolina Passing Offense, with some weaves reinjected, and a gazillion collected situation specific action/plays that can be called when the passing offense is not creating the open looks, and momentum changing basket is needed NOW.
And he is running it whether it is 4 out 1 in, or 5 out, or 3-2, or 1-2-2, and he is running it whether he is playing inside out, or outside in. Once you understand the difference between an untimed passing offense and a timed set offense, then you understand how this can be so. You can play an untimed passing game out of any formation and you can approach deforming defenses inside out or outside in.
Note: I believe Self actually struggled a bit with the inversion of outside in. It is one of those mental flexibility things that is sometimes easier to make if you don't know enough. We are all prisoners of our experience and the expectations and assumptions they build into us. View the world from an outside in POV long enough and it seems that that is the only way the Carolina Passing game can work. But the real underlying elegance and beauty of Iba's absolutely brilliant paradigm shift in offense is that it fits well with the reality that offensive motion and defensive reaction are kind of like a gas in a volume. They can be expanded and condensed, as well as being condensed and expanded. To wit, you can compress a defense by inside to threaten an inside trey, that then creates an open shot outside. But inversely, you can expand things by going outside to threaten a trey, and then attacking through the expansion cracks for an inside trey. And you can mask the formations you do it in, so the opponent is not quite sure what the hell you are going to do before you do it.
Again, what frustrates fans watching the offense is how much standing around occurs sometimes and how much the ball seems to just loop around the perimeter without creating open shots. Inside out is the way you traditionally play the Carolina Passing Offense aka the High Low to try to deform the defense (collapsing it inward with a pass into the post) so that when the ball comes out of the post and reverse ASAP around the perimeter an open look occurs without a screen needing t be set.
When things aren't working, all the standing around looks bad.
But when things are working with deformation, then quick passes to an open look, the standing around is a great energy saver over the course of a game. Passing on offense saves energy for for impact play, for a scoring drive, for transition, and most of all for DEFENSE.
THE CAROLINA PASSING OFFENSE/HIGH LOW IS A SYSTEM OF OFFENSE AND DEFENSE.
The more you run the passing game, the more energy you save for jump shooting, driving and dunking, getting out on the break, getting back on defense, and GUARDING HARD ON DEFENSE.
The more action your run involving multiple players constantly running, running, running, screening, screening, cutting, moving, moving, moving, the less energy you have left to do the important things that actually GET YOU POINTS and DENY THEM POINTS.
But when things aren't working, fans (me included sometimes) shout, why don't you run some action, set some screens, run some ball screens, run some elaborate 3 to 5 player coordinated, timed plays that GET SOMEONE OPEN!!!!
Running set plays is very appealing to fans. It is a very simple, linear and mechanistic approach to the game. 1 runs to 2 and sets a screen. 2 shuffles around 1 and runs across the lane and back picks the high post 4. The high post 4 scrapes his man off the back pick and takes a feed in the lane from the wing 3. The high post 4 puts it on the deck and draws the defender guarding the low post 5. The driving high post 4 lobs it up to the rim to the open low post 5 who dunks it. A nice linear sequence of events. Simple to drawn up. Simple to think about. Simple to understand.
But it leads to congestion inside. Everyone is moving and expending energy. Timing is required. If you do it often enough opponents scheme against it and disrupt the timing and it doesn't work. The extremes of the set offense are the Oklahoma Shuffle and the Princeton. Disrupt-ability is why the Princeton Offense has finally fallen into disfavor. It relied too much on timing and though it was improvised into some options that made it less predictable, the bottom line was that if you just stayed with your man, fought through the screens and kept bumping everyone everywhere on the floor every chance you got, sooner or later the timing was going to get screwed up and either a shot was not going to open up, or the clock was going to run out, and the offense was not conducive to solo impact plays.
The Carolina Passing Offense/High Low and the Dribble Drive and the Triple Post are popular today, because because in a high contact game, they are least vulnerable to disruption of timing. They are flexible. They are episodic offenses, picaresque, if you are familiar with the literary term. The ball is moving around the floor in search of a situation to exploit. Each situation, or episode is a little attempted attack with a short menu of options of what to do depending on how the defense reacts. When the attack cannot work, the ball just moves on. There is no resetting anything.
The dribble drive differs in principle from the Carolina Passing offense only in that it moves the ball around the floor searching for a situation in which to ball screen and create space off the dribble, which simultaneously deforms the defense, or can when things are working.
In contrast, the Carolina Passing Offense/High Low only resorts to ball screening and actions, when the passing game isn't deforming the defense enough to get open looks. And even after the action plays, it tries to go back to the passing game.
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- EOF (another little Fortran allusion, at least if I recall correctly. It is an idiosyncracy of mine to recall Fortran in a post ever season or two. In the digital age, it is kind of like making an allusion in Latin. :-))
