🏀 KuBuckets Archive

(Note: this post was a response triggered by a wonderful post by @JhawkAlum about Self moving away since 2006 from more mechanical set plays and toward more improvisational,option-enriched type of offense.)

@JhawkAlum

I agree with your reading completely.

What persons often don't appreciate is how difficult it is to make leaps of insight like that you refer to being made by Self.

We truly are prisoners of experience, but also of our expectations which are the products of that experience.

We have experiences.

They create expectations.

We have a bunch of related experiences.

They create an expectation complex.

When we can devise actions through that expectation complex that get us where we want to go, or get us what we want to get, then we "believe" that expectation complex is real, and the actions are repeatable with some minor adaptations.

But when we get the snot beaten out of us, we look at the expectation complex and say, hmm, maybe there is another action consistent with it that we have overlooked.

We look for it and find one, because we always find what we look for, and that is very scary truth. :-)

Sometimes the new action works. We continue to embrace the expectation complex.

Sometimes it doesn't work. If it doesn't work enough times, if we are very smart and very brave, we stop looking for new actions for the old expectation complex.

Instead we question the expectation complex. Is my expectation complex sufficiently fitting? fitting at all? i.e., is my conception of the context I am operating in wrong?

Again, we find what we are looking for and again that is a scary truth.

We rebuild our expectation complex. We do it by studying what is actually going on and by soul searching about our capacities.

Due to difficulty of seeing the scope of our context very comprehensively, we often only partially rebuild our expectation complex to fit it.

This leads to successes some times and to failures sometimes.

Successes we select toward, but usually the successes are only partial so we keep searching the context for more fitting expectations and in turn more fitting actions.

If you understand the process I have outlined, you can see why Self would only after many years of coaching have the insight that more fluid, option enriched play might be more fitting than more mechanical, option narrowed play. The longer he coached the more he noticed that situations were not highly predictable, i.e., the expectation complex of games and individual situations in games were much more complex than he had once appreciated. Creating more options in any given situation made a player harder to guard, and capitalized on the players on the spot judgement, if a player had good on the spot judgement. Designing impact space rather than designing impacts began to make more sense, because it made his guys harder to guard and less mechanistic in their actions. They performed better up to a point, if he recognized that there could also be a point of diminishing returns.

This is all well and good, but notice what Self did NOT change when he changed his expectation complex and changed his action menu.

He still had long big men play with back to basket the way they always had and he still had them occasionally run out to the top of the free throw circle to stretch the defense and clear out the lane and take some shots.

And he still had perimeter guys still playing with faces to the basket and either taking open looks, or creating looks in spaces, putting it on the deck and going to iron.

It never occurred to him, or at least he did not have the talent constraints of players, that forced him to think about using both bigs outside and playing them face to basket not to stretch the defense, but rather to put them in a similar mode of attack to perimeter players. Yes, he had used Marcus in this way, but never both big men.

But then he got this set of small big men. And no matter how he tried coaching them up, they just werent very good at back to the basket play, when playing against LASs. He tried everything and nothing worked. No action solved the problem. He had to examine his expectation complex. His expectation complex was that one big man was out high and another big man was down low. They rotated. When one was out high,he faced the basket. When one was low one played back to basket. Something made him say: why not change that expectation complex? Why can't they both be out their facing the basket? Either in turn, or simultaneously? Why can't these guys just be face to the basket types so that they are always on the run to the basket and jumping?They are short but they are good jumpers. With running jumps they can play much taller than grinding for position back to basket and still being too short to sergeant jump or one step jump against these LASs that just eat them alive.

I have no idea what Self calls this new approach to big man play within this new expectation complex that he appears to be evolving. I call it:

MBMAPs--mobile big man attack platforms.

Each of KU's bigs is no longer a dedicated traditional type of big man, either down low, or up high.

Now each KU big man is a long bouncey face to the basket that is focused on slashing and crashing. He is focused on using his speed and hops to convert into playing taller, rebounding taller, and scoring taller by attacking rebounds, attacking the rim and attacking opponents. They are attacking ball screens now. The word of the day is attack.

I call our big men platforms because they are player capable of being channelled into all kinds of attacks based on the abilities of the opponents they face. These big men of ours are platforms that deploy that are then programmed to attack with a menu of options, like our perimeter guys have always had.

I call them mobile, because this face to the basket play can be deployed down low or out high, or eventually anywhere on the floor and they are on the move during attack, too. Jamari Traylor was the definitive MBMAP against Baylor. MBMAPs need to be explosive. He is. But now instead of exploding out of fixed positions on the court to help other teammates he is more often exploding to attack the basket. They can even revert, situationally, to back to the basket play if it were ever useful, but it rarely is against top teams with LASs.

And Oubre is really not a perimeter player any more. He is now like a wing post man, a MBMAP placed on one wing to force an overshift of the defense to that wing, so that the other two MBMAPs (our form high low posts) have lanes of attack from the over shifted defenses.

Opponents once always knew where our high and low posts were going to be, and they knew they were going to rotate from high to low, or side to side. Those days are over for opponents. They can no longer can be sure where our MBMAPs will set up. There will be places they tend to set up, but there will be more of those places and more menu options for attacking from them. It makes our small bigs harder to guard.

@wrwlumpy

Howling.

@Crimsonorblue22

I feel you would be able to answer that better than little old me. :-)

@wrwlumpy

I get the pun, but you will have to articulate the acronym G.A.S.M for me for this word play to work for me.

Oh, on second thought, not. :-)

@wrwlumpy

You probably know the great scientific secret of the last 50 years; that science has largely left parametric statistical inference behind and embraced the algorithm without telling the ordinary folks.

It is vaguely analogous to the precedent of the Vatican accepting Charlemagne's bestowal of temporal powers on the Vatican's spiritual authorities to make the wetware technology of that particular religion and its leader useful as a means of governance. The flock was not really told much about the gravity of the implications of their religion and its leadership becoming instituted as a temporal bureaucracy to rule them. There was after all a rather profound difference between confessing to your spiritual guide,who has a power to save your soul with a blessing, and confessing to your governor, who has the power and right to hang you, burn you, crucify you, imprison you, or otherwise disseminate that information to police authorities without your knowledge, or recourse.

(Note: I like Catholicism, like I like all religions, when some minority of them, as with some minority of all religions, is not behaving vilely.)

In science, in the good old days of induction, we studied things and we had a philosophy and logical foundation that made valid and meaningful our theoretical explanations of phenomena with probabilities of confidence (i.e., those hypotheses tested and found not refuted).

But we found over time that there were too many things we wanted to study that we could not study by induction without violating the assumptions of induction.

There were too many discoveries that lead us into too many realms where induction just didn't work very well.

We basically decided, what the heck, who cares if we violate the assumptions. We can at least learn something quantitatively by using models with violated parametric assumptions and accurately measured variable values.

And once we got used to that we decided, what the heck, why don't we move beyond the parametric models we are violating the assumptions of and just build algorithms, i.e., models that we "believe" will give useful answers. And let's gauge their usefulness by testing how well they predict the past, i.e., the historical data points we used to build the algorithm in the first place. And let's gauge how well they predict the future, too. And if they do both pretty well, then lets use those algorithms as explanations of phenomena, like we used to use empirically verified theories of induction.

And then we decided who the hell cares if those algorithms are right or not, if they will attract grants, let's work with them, and tried to wring at least some useful meanings out of them as we keep the lab open and overhead covered.

Today, in the age of the algorithm, induction is used ad hoc to create statistically significant confidence in the reliability of certain "parameters" and certain "variables" used in an algorithm. Alas, doing so can get rather like a car salesman that might use brand spanking new and highly tested and trustworthy Michelin tires as something to point to and say, "See, this fine, previously owned car has good tires, so you can trust that it will be a good car."

But of course the good tires may be empirically verifiable facts, but they may be mounted on the rusted rims and broken lug nuts of a rusted out hulk with the rust covered over by a cheap paint job.

The validity of our science increasingly depends not on the replicability of measurable findings, but on the character of the scientists extrapolating via algorithms beyond the statistically verifiable realms of empirical reality.

And that sort of reliance was exactly what drove us to inductive science in the first place way back when.

KENPOM's algorithms, much as I appreciate the insights he has achieved, and how much more knowledge there is to gain down the path he walks, is, nonetheless, an algorithmic based analysis.

So say your Hail Marys and hope he is a high priest of QA with good character. For when the inductive is mixed with the algorithmic, it is not unlike the religious being mixed with the temporal.

Nothing is ever quite the same afterwards.

@wrwlumpy

If a fan enjoys such, does that make it a Fan-PASM? :-)

@wrwlumpy

Cumbertatch is the Olivier of this generation.

Probably better.

Olivier was probably better on stage.

Cumberbatch is far better in front of a camera.

Great photo and reference.

Having said that, here is a but...

But remember. KU winning by a small margin in no way refutes KENPOM's quantitative portrayal of KU.

QA is never about being right, or wrong, any more than a radio telescope is about producing a life like image of Alpha Centauri. QA is about capturing and analyzing the quantities counted in numbers produced by a facet of a phenomena to understand it from that perspective. Nothing more. But nothing less. Events are multi-faceted. Events have quantities, so quantity is a facet of events to study.

To the point, it is better in QA to be wrong by a narrow error factor, at least in predictive estimations and simulations, than to be right with a huge error factor because all QA is, whether it admits so or not, arriving at confidence intervals; this is something a lot of folks--though not odds makers--struggle with. :-)

And not just odds makers and Quants and scientists grasp this, but artists, too. Any really good artist understands that the rightness of a composition of an image rests on a constellation of approximately equilibrated and juxtaposed forms, colors, textures, symbols and signs in a dangling mobile-like balance of internal references in the image itself and amongst the image and the artist's (and hopefully the viewers) perceptions of reality beyond the image.

Your image of Cumberbatch as Turing with the masonry matrix of the past behind him on the Z-axis of time back of which he lacks recollection juxtaposed against his invented computer cypher of the moment that is a formal externalization of his mind revealing both its structure and connectivity projected beside him on the X-Y axis expresses visually Turing's complicated immediate past and increasingly formalized present and immediate future.

This is the form language of cinema that great directors speak without expecting audiences to necessarily grasp it, any more than great Italian Renaissance painters expected artistically untrained persons of their time to necessarily "read" the compositions of their paintings. It is quite enough for even the greatest artist just to have some ordinary folk enjoy the heck out of what he has done. He does not need them to get all his techniques he uses to create the effects he creates that dazzle and delight. Nevethe less, the image you chose has a sense of aesthetic formal visual rightness that orders and makes it compelling to an audience to one degree or another, with and without their understanding of his methods.

Further, a computer in this image is fundamentally a device for processing quantities of events in quantities of time, which was one of Turing's great insights. The smaller the increments of time made possible by the evolution of time keeping (from the large increments of sun dials, to the shrinking increments of pendulum clocks, to coiled sprung and geared chronographs, to atomic clocks, to quantum clocks) the greater the richness and complexity of simulations become possible. If a computer is tasked with a computation that takes a millionth of a second, but your clock only works in seconds, then you can only coordinate with real time with intervals of seconds. But split a second into nano seconds, or Graham number seconds, or smaller, and you can orchestrate a lot more computations with real time events with a phenomenally fast computer. With a quantum computer breaking seconds into near incomprehensible near simultaneities of time increments, a driverless car with a feed back loop of sufficient complexity and speed becomes utterly feasible to achieve. So might simulating the computational speed and richness of a human mind, though we run into the initial limits of not being interpret the reliability of outcomes of what we are enabling to happen at such high speeds in such short times.

Breaking codes and pass words as Turing set out to do with brute force serial processing is nothing more than combining great quantities of combinations of symbols matched against known sequences of symbolic meaning (pattern recognition) in tiny quantities of time. It seems obvious now, but it took a Turing to make the connections between what IS inside the mind with what is possible to build outside the mind to augment it to a rather specialized, rote task. The mechanical type writer and the mechanical calculator, telegraphy and radio, mathematical modeling, concepts of statistics, basic chemical, mechanical and electrical engineering, as well as higher mathematics and Base 1 were indispensible foundations that had to be in place for Turing to externalize the conception of human deciphering of meanings from the brain across the the skull wall barrier to the machine manifest beside Cumberbatch, as Turing.

It was one of many extraordinary moments of human thought externalizing across that skull wall boundary into something unprecedented and enduring, rather than atomizing in ephemerality. We would see and know something similar in an image of Isaac Newton holding a book of the calculus standing beside a canon, Watt standing beside a steam engine in a coal mine. Ford standing besides a Model T on a wagon road, or Crick and Watson standing beside a model of a DNA helix, r John von Neuman beside a formalized strategic game on a black board. We could think: when this shizz gets outside the skull it can go viral and change the world and ourselves in startling, only partially predicatable ways. Or we could be visual artists and make images with the tools of aesthetic form languages and graphic punctuation. And both actions would reveal insights about facets of the phenomenon.

You overlaying tongue-in-cheek your white, perhaps New Century School Book (I would enjoy such an allusion to the pedantic) font exclamation, as satiric and ironic reference to what I wrote about statistics in regard to JNew and KENPOM's QA of KU and the B12 both destroys (or redirects as is the vogue expression these days) the equilibrated composition of the director's image and in the destruction (redirection) creates an new meaning and new, or re-equilibrated composition, as good satire does in all the contexts and art forms that satire may be applied in.

I suspect I am mastering the obvious for you here, but I am taking the opportunity to use another one of your marvelous image/message combinations as an excuse to share with others a basic insight about QA and perhaps help them appreciate its potential contribution to our understanding of what is happening.

QA is about being close for the right reasons.

KENPOM's prediction was close and so one should look more closely at his profile of reasons to discover controllable elements of it that might enable KU to escape its determinism. All systems can be open ended, or closed, depending to some degree whether we choose to reinforce them, or break out of them, as Turing chose to break out/externalize a game changer (the computer) across the skull wall boundary and so move beyond his analog, masonry past and agonizingly into a digital, vacuum-tubed and electron-flow connected Base 1 present. And the director brilliantly puts the audience in a perspective that feels like one is looking back at Turing who is in our past.

Capice?

:-)

@VailHawk

I know people think I am out in the ethers when I say this, but I am absolutely serious. It happens because KU Basketball is a living myth.

Living myths are regenerative connections to the life force.

The more you give to it the more it gives back.

The more you learn the more you can share.

Literary and cinematic myths are things like StarWars and they are not interactive. They are a one way energy transfer...from the creators to the viewers.

But at the center of the living myth of KU basketball is not an illusion, not an art work, but a living breathing team. We are not cheering for a KU video made once a week. We are cheering for the real team of human beings that the weekly video is made about.

Self is real. He is not an image of a coach.

Allen Field House is unique. The light that comes in it really is different than the light that one finds in any other arena.

Lawrence really was born of a Civil War in which one of the great issues of human history--are humans meant to be free and self governing, or toadies of an aristocracy with slaves--was played out.

Kansas in the 1890s really did attract one of the most extraordinary collections of persons ever and really did generate a People's Party that said: "the government is the people and we are the people."

The inventor of the game really did bring it to the shelter of Lawrence and the university, after seeing it coarsened and vulgarized in the big easter cities.

The first coach and the first genius the game produced really did produce the KU basketball legacy for nearly 50 years.

KU really was among the programs that integrated the game.

KU really has had a phenomenal involvement in the evolution of the game.

It really is the father of all basketball programs.

Basketball really is the greatest game ever invented.

All of these things are like logs on a mythic fire that burns on.

You cannot help but experience it and feel its warmth.

The myth lives.

You touch it.

And it touches you back.

That is what is different about this.

@Crimsonorblue22

I know.

@Crimsonorblue22

It will grow on you. :-)

You are going to be seeing a lot of it on the floor.

The big men are going to have to become like wing initiators, only from the high post. They are all going to have to run cuts to iron, and dribble drive it.

There is not future in back to the basket play for this group of bigs.

But they can really create an identity for themselves by becoming MBMAPs.

@jayhawkbychoice

LAS = Long and Strong

@Crimsonorblue22

My god, if Self even decided to quit free riding on Perry and scheme some stuff for him, Perry will have some very good games.

What Self is doing is just letting Perry muddle a long on his own, while Self tries to find ways to turn Oubre and Cliff and others into D1 players. Self is having to do all sorts of special stuff for Oubre and Cliff just to get the pacifiers out of their mouths and get them up to D1 speeds. While he focuses on scheming stuff for them so they don't just get blown out of the tub all of the time, Perry has to kind of run around and make do on his own. This is a real trial for Perry. Self did the same thing to Marcus Morris his second year.

Self always says its is a big step up from being the second option inside to the first. He said that about Thomas Robinson, when he took over for the Morri.

Perry is having to find out how lonely it is on a D1 floor when there are no older brothers looking out for you when the blue meanies come calling. Its just you and them. There's no Embiid. No nothing but Perry.

Cliff is off in head school. Cliff is thinking too much to really take the pressure off yet.

Oubre helps but relieve the pressure on Perry, but Oubre is no where near advanced enough to actually help Perry directly.

Perry is so quiet no one realizes that he is carrying the load out there even though it looks pretty bad some times.

And here is the thing: Perry is carrying the load AND the team 12-2 and has played one of the toughest schedules in the country. Talk about lonely. But for all of Perry's limitations as a 4, he just never quits coming. He is a true Kansas guy. Quiet. No excuses. Just keeps doing his job. It was a tough pre-conference schedule to have to become the guy in.

One of the things we did on defense that Baylor was not expecting is we blocked quite a few shots for a small team. We got seven blocks to their 5. Perry actually got 3 blocks.

What I want to say about Perry is something a lot of people don't understand, or appreciate.

People always are quick to praise results: scoring, boards, etc.

But there is a thing called keeping going, keeping trying, keeping playing hard when nothing is working for you that is crucial for a team's players to be able to do.

Perry has had a history of folding out there, disappearing, when they block his shots and keep him off the boards.

But Perry didn't fold tonight. He kept flailing away against guys way bigger and more powerful than he was. He was on the floor many times. And he was scrapping with those big lugs. And to repeat he got three important blocks.

Look at their three bigs: ON'ealewent 1-7, Gathers 3-10, and Motley 1-5.

That can't happen unless all of your bigs keep fighting even when things look bad.

If any one of your bigs quits on you and disappears, then its 3 on 2 inside and you get overwhelmed.

But Perry Ellis learned tonight that even when he is being overwhelmed, if he will just keep fighting as hard as possible and banging and scrapping, that that will hold his man and keep him from helping on the other two. Perry learned tonight that he can make a big contribution even when he can't do squat in terms of scoring and rebounding. He learned to play a good floor game when all else fails.

In some ways, Perry Ellis was what made it possible. In previous games like this one, he would disappear and then our other bigs would be overwhelmed. But that did not happen tonight.

Cliff also did some good things that don't show up much over 20 minutes, but were critical in the second half. He was only 2-3, but but notice that he got 4 assists. Those four assists were something new for him and that mean he was actually instrumental in 12 points (8 on assists and 4 of his own). He couldn't board much for reasons I don't understand.

@VailHawk

You look at our offensive numbers and it really came down to Jamari going 6-7 through the part of the game where our guys just didn't know if they could play as tough as Baylor. Jam Tray got them through the crisis of confidence, and then Brannen (4-5), Frank (5-11) and Wayne (4-9) just played very balls to the walls down the stretch.

@bskeet

Yeah, it really is a wonderful win to squeeze out on the road.

@VailHawk

Notice that Rico Gathers, who seemed to be just too much for us to handle on the glass just could not get untracked inside. He went 3-10.

We sure as heck did not control the boards. We were minus 8 on the glass.

But we turned it into an inside shooting game and our M2M helping inside jammed them up and we found the seams inside on their zone, especially from about 14 to go the second half.

@RedRooster

Frankly, I didn't think there were that many in Waco that would go to a game. :-)

The quantitative answer is we completely shut off their inside shooting game...held them to 34%.

@VailHawk

I am not really sure to tell you the truth.

The simple answer is what I wrote about a few days ago: Self's approach is to hang around and let other teams self destruct.

But there was more to it than that.

This was a very tough match-up zone Baylor played. Very tough to get shots on. All match-ups are that way when played correctly.

20-25 years back I worked on some research about the future of the internet. And it is really amazing what we did NOT foresee. Never had a clue this sort of thing would happen. Predicted online communities, even chat boards, but never ever even dreamed of persons sitting around all over the country chatting in real time about a game.

Much better than just watching without interacting.

And it keeps one one one's toes and learning. Everyone sees a little something else and it helps to get a feel for the flow of games.

@VailHawk

Yeah, its funny this chatting during the games has become a very fun thing. I really think it is one of the best things that have fallen out of the whole online sports gig, at least for me.

@KUSTEVE

Ah, it must have been you that was down there.

@KUSTEVE

The last ten minutes they played like guys that wanted to win a street fight. They can now walk proudly when the older guys come back for games to watch them.

Good question about Global...didn't he say he was down in Florida? Maybe he is out night fishing.

@Crimsonorblue22

Good call. His drives down the lane turned the tide. He was the only guy at that point that didn't seem to be intimidated by how intense B12 ball was. He kind of just said, give me the ball and let me drive guys. I'll show you we can play at this speed.

Well, let's see. It looks like KUBuckets.com should be part of the Civil Defense system. When commercial internet breaks down, this hardened web site keeps on ticking.

And the game ball goes to...

!OW3.jpg ↗

@Crimsonorblue22

This allusion eludes me. Clarify?

@KUSTEVE

Thankeeee kindly.

@brooksmd

8 TOs?

That's our new offensive scheme.

@joeloveshawks

PHOF

Anyone that insults Drew in a new way that hasn't been done before gets a PHOF

@Crimsonorblue22

I believe so.

But then I am just a pussy cat with ladies.

@wissoxfan83

So, why does KUSports get some bandwidth, but not JNew at CJOL?

Did Keegs accidentally on purpose sit on his router box?

@Crimsonorblue22

And during the game I said it was Brannen's to win.

@Crimsonorblue22

I'm in with the in crowd

@joeloveshawks

PHOF

@brooksmd

:+1:

@DanR

PHOF

I have invented a new stat for Perry.

FGs/blocks

@Kip_McSmithers

menora?

@RedRooster

You out did yourself tonight.

Rock Chalk!

@Kip_McSmithers

The new saying at KSU is you don't play the opponent, you play against Bruce Weber.

It was artistry by Self milking this thing out.

Artistry.

Have scientists in Waco figured out how to freeze time inside that area?

If we win this now, I predict Scott will lie down on the floor and get in the fetal position and thumb suck to self-calm

@VailHawk

Its not really a sell out. Its just a whole bunch of Chanellor Starr's stock of confiscated old love dolls of Bill Clinton's

Self is thinking, oh, no, now I have to play the wild hair even more minutes next game.