Howling!!!!!
jaybate 1.0
10346 posts
You've been had, Ryman. :-)
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK
We had to get geeked for this game.
Without Joel, fan factor now takes on additional importance.
Forgive me if I bent some noses, but it was essential to get this lighter than air ship waaaaaaaaay high. :-)
Self cannot let this become a showdown between Smart and Naa, or we lose. Period.
Naa has to play his game, meaning making 3-4 treys efficiently and he has to pot some pull ups in transition.
Naa's role is to make sure KU plays well when in transition and does what he can to get KU in transition.
Naa and Smart straight up on either end are a recipe for an L.
Reality principle, Francis, always the reality principle.
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But Wigs did only have 2 assists and made no one better. [Self will make sure Wigs does make someone better now, because Wigs will listen now.]
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KU lost.
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Bushistas reputedly DID steal Florida and Gore reputedly did sell out for a sweet deal on a pollution biz for going in the tank on the recount and letting the US Supreme Court seal it.
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I actually met someone that named his cat DOG!
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And if King Larry gets castrated by a hostile axis of private oligarchy, another axis of oligarchy out of power secretly calls him Queen Mary!!!!
Yeeeeeee Hawwwwwww!
I had to work like hell at getting some blood boiling around here, but it looks like it finally worked.
Things were getting too passive around here.
I found the right stick to poke the dogs with.
Yeeeeeee Hawwwwwwww!
41 points and 2 assists.
Never again!!
First of all, everyone needs to realize that in Self's mind KU doesn't need to radically adapt at all, because OSU only beat them decisively because of TOs and some laxness on baseline scoring. Self can easily say, scheme and practice protection, plus play harder on the baseline and we will win, because OSU won't have another Herculean effort in them.
But...
With Embiid probably 50/50 to make it back at all, and reminded today of Self's quote on adapting what we do have to work, and his penchant for liking to play it anyway they want, I expect Self to go on the attack defensively in order to counteract OSU's like high pressure disruption defense, and up tempo game. By this I mean he is going to covert to a more disruptive defensive scheme to compensate for KU's structural vulnerability to OSU's superior defensive ability on the perimeter.
Further, I believe, contrary to conventional wisdom, that our guys can play high pressure, disruption defense, they just haven't been asked to do it much, because the plan was to stick with Embiid rim protection defense and a lot of three point pressure outside, with lots of penetration stopped by Embiid. This was pressure inside and pressure outside, but no disruption (and so few TOs). It was all focused on lowering shooting percentages in the three point locations inside (bucket and a FT) and outside with treys. It worked great with Joel, but not with Tar, or Landon.
The alternative defense is disruption defense. This is where you attack passing lanes, you disrupt ball circulation, more than shooting. Everywhere the ball goes hands are grabbing at it. Every scrape off the ball is poked at.
Self cannot let OSU turn this into a battle of TOs in which KU defends conservatively and OSU makes single digit TOs, while OSU attacks defensively and KU makes double digit TOs.
On the other hand, KU's biggest edge is Wiggins at a wing, and the depth of big men inside unless Tar does the foul-up thing early.
Alas KU's biggest MUD (matchup disadvantage) is the perimeter. They can shut down all but Wiggins and they can contain Wiggins. We can't guard their guys. One of their perimeter backups is way better than all of our perimeter backups.
Conclusion: Self cannot simply turn this into another half court, big man game, even though KU holds the big man edge, because even if Self were to find a way to force an inside game, that will default into a half court perimeter matchup KU would lose.
If you don't want to exploit your big man advantage near the basket on defense and offense by forcing half court sets, how do you optimize out them? You create transition and exploit their length and athleticism in secondary breaks; this also dove tails with Wiggins edge in transition.
Transition basketball denies OSU its 3/4 court pinching, disrupting defense.
Transition basketball requires disruption defense, because while you may be able to guard the ball well inside, you do not want to have to start all of your possessions either on made baskets or close in rebounds, where OSU has time to get back and pinch.
KU has to start attacking defense farther out now.
KU needs to create long shots and long rebounds and TOs farther out so that KU is in transition and OSU is on its heals. Once OSU is on its heals, then both Wiggins and KU's big men hold maximum edge.
This kind of game also minimizes the time and possessions KU's outmatched guards have to be exploited in a half court set on either end.
The other way to play OSU is to run the stuff every trip in half court sets and protect like hell, but this leaves your guards exposed to disruption defense, which they don't handle very well.
Attack and disrupt on defense. Know you are going to give up some easy baskets on missed gambles. Transition.
Self rarely plays it this way, but I think he has to try this game.
Who will step up?
Selden would if he still had pop, but I don't think he does.
Wiggins has to get 20.
But Perry and Tar and Jam Tray have to play like gangbusters defensively and on the secondary break to get us the edge we need. No more massive passives.
Naa has got to sew his balls back on and play like the little guy that can.
Its gotta be Naa. I don't how he can do it, but Self does.
@JRyman In Nebraska, Dr. Tom, or Warren B? :-)
Say, what's the status of the bitumen pipeline that was supposed to cross Nebraska to deliver Canadian tar sand bitumen to Texas refineries?
Was Nebraska able to marshall forces to stop it after realigning with the Big Ten states, or was a deal finally cut?
I saw this before, but the significance did not sink in, as I was preoccupied.
I want to expand a bit on why this melds with my point about attack.
When you are not a great, classic Self Defense team, as your time series stats make starkly clear, you HAVE to adapt.
All guerrilla and terrorist warfare are based on adapting to the inadequacy of ones forces to defend broadly against an overwhelming adversary.
It is not that you cannot defend anything at all.
It is that you must pick and choose where, when and what the purpose of defense is.
Self Defense is about defending everywhere with overwhelming force.
If you cannot defend everywhere with overwhelming force, then you must either defend somewhere with overwhelming force, as we defend close to the basket with Embiid, or you must constantly vary where the point of defensive attack and pressure are applied. The idea is to keep the enemy off balance with defensive counter attacks.
Travis Ford is a little man. He has had to learn all his life about how to attack defensively in a varying way, because he has never been big enough to contain an opponent all over. Thus, when Travis Ford found himself without Cobbins, he adapted with varying defenses that all had one thing in common: vary the point of attack until the the opponent was off balance. This is what zone pressing does. It gives the defensive team an entire court to pick and choose where to unleash the defensive point of attack.
Bill Self was a big guard, not a huge one, not a hugely athletic one, but a big, broad shouldered combo guard that could and did guard you everywhere in order to avoid having to guard you very much at the rim where you could likely out jump him. It is his mind set.
Thus, when Self was confronted with the inability of this team to guard everywhere he resorted rightly to guarding somewhere, but he resorted to Embiid and his bigs guarding close in. It was an entrenching form of defensive attack of the kind Robert E. Lee specialized in, until he realized that it was costing him too much and did not produce decisive victories. Lee made the right choice. He went on the offensive on marches into Maryland and Virginia in search of disruption in the enemy's rear, in pursuit of his rail pinch points enabling both his interruption of Union troop and supply movements, and giving him access to Washington DC and Baltimore from his hoped for objectives in Harrisburg and York PA, from whence he intended to sweep down rapidly and take Baltimore and Washington and so control the Chesapeake Bay and thus draw the covert ally of Britain into an overt ally.
Lee moved north to Maryland first in hopes of turning largely pro southern state controlling the east side of the Chesapeake Bay, and the rail head of the Baltimore and Ohio, knowing that Lincoln would commit forces decisively to prevent him. He knew taking Maryland depended entirely on the people of Maryland being willing to join in and overthrow the Union occupation of Baltimore, which they were finally not willing to do. But he also knew that if he moved on Maryland first with the eventual aim of taking York PA, that if the people of Maryland did not rally the state to his side, that his Armies could then entrench a small force, sweep west more rapidly that the Union could follow and then turn north moving up three mountain valley corridors, using the mountains as flank screens before breaking into open country in Pennsylvannia, where he would be able to race toward Harrisburg, where the largest Union troop training base logistical warehousing and distribution center was located, and thus hold the necessary supplies, and hold the necessary hostages, to turn south and pick a battlefield to entrench and defend agains the onslaught of the converging, amassed Union Army. From that entrenched battle field he would then hold the Union force at bay and flank with one of his armies, encircle and destroy the converged Union Army and win the war by first strangling off Washington DC from supply, and then depending on Northern response, probably move north quickly by rail to take Trenton New Jersey and its iron works and port where he could contain Philadelphia, and order Confederate Armies in the Carolinas to move north by train to take Washington D.C. and so begin an iron clad based naval blockade on New York and Boston with the by then certain assistance of the British, if necessary.
The point is is that it is hogwash that the South could not have won the war with the sort of limited defensive capacities that it had. It could not defend the entirety of the south because of limited defensive capacity if it chose to remain on the defensive. But it could go on the attack and pick mobile locations in places the Union could not anticipate clearly and could successfully defend and attack, so long as he never overcommitted his forces on the wrong battle field in a head on assault.
Only the foolishness of Jeb Steuart's cavalry leaving his side undid Lee's gambit, for blinded by the absence of Steuart's cavalry, Lee buckled under the pressure, and resorted to his early military training in concentrated frontal assault Napoleonic style, rather than listening to Longstreet' telling him to withdraw to the mountains to the west, entrench and fight there, instead of moving into Gettysburg. Lee was blinded by the chimera of crushing the Union in Gettysburg and so making use of the narrow gauge railway extending east of Gettysburg that would allow him sudden rapid mobility eastward. It was the same narrow gauge railroad that the Union then used to crush him with logistics.
The point is: inadequate global defensive capability does not determine failure. High mobility attacking defense can work also, and one is regardless, finally at the mercy of one's mistakes, and at the hand of lady luck in one's opponent's mistakes.
KU can turn this situation into an advantage as surely as Travis Ford did once his point guard finally got hold of himself and recommitted to purposeful approach to victory.
Great recall on UConnvicts. They really were the transitional team in the migration to Cal's OAD ball. Stacked was not the word for them.
Backfillin'.
@jaybate 1.0
Keep it up jaybate 1.0. I am going to backfill you like these other aliases should be doing. Your posts are bs, jaybate. What proof do you have of anything? Why your posts are long winded and you pass everything you write off as fact, and persons I know say you are argumentative and your feet smell bad, too. And, and, and you're long winded, novel-like posts, someone needs to tell you are being laughed at in recent meetings of The Quasi-Limited Freemasons and The Walruses, The Sons of Katy Elder and Simulacra'r'Us. Yeah, remember I'm backfilling you, too, jaybate 1.0. But I'm giving you the last word, so when you respond, I can backfill you again. Really? Really? Really?
Bad regards, jaybate 1.0 Prime
(Note: all fiction. No malice.)
There you go again. I didn't say mine were easy. I said I couldn't follow your logic. 😊
PHOF
Naadir, Perry, Tarik.
Copy and paste.
Add Jam Tray.
And they will.
If Self will adapt.
And he will.
And it can start against OSU.
Slice the seams of the press.
Slice the seams of the press.
Do not fear a press. Love slicing its seams
Do not fear a press. Love slicing its seams.
The fates have brought OSU to us first precisely that we confront that which we most doubt in ourselves first.
And if we are beaten, it is not over.
The crucible merely takes another form.
Midway forms two weeks out.
All that matters now is preparation for Midway.
This is the misdirection need for the preparation.
Smart, Brown, and Nash are simply our opportunities to confront that which we most fear. It is our chance to mark the end of retreat. It is the stalemate required to go on full offensive. It is thus critically important but not decisive. It is Coral Sea.
The only real question is are the players tired of having the fight taken to them? Are they sick enough at watching the carnage of being on the defensive? Do they want finally to say, regardless of how young we are, of how limited we are, do they want to say, "Here, now, in this marginal battle, we go on the attack. Win or lose, we stem the tide here, now."
This OSU game is momentous.
In basketball, especially Bill Self basketball, defense is offense, transition is offense, and offense is offense.
We have been on the strategic defensive for several weeks now while we reorganized our forces and looked for a place to go on the offensive again.
This is it.
If not now, when?
If not here, where?
If not OSU, who?
The team must go on the attack.
But the team must not mistake this B12 tournament for Midway, whatever happens.
This is the Coral Sea.
We can lose here and still win, if we inflict carnage not he enemy. If we change his perception of us and of how we fight.
This could be terribly rough and we may take a beating, but we have to dish out a beating. We have to be on the offensive.
There can be no more backpedaling and regrouping from this point.
There can only be feints, surprise and furious attack.
This game is a chance to put the fear of god in our enemies--to let them know that the gloves are off; that the young team is now a mean, hard team.
That whether you beat us in anyone battle, we are coming at you and we are not going to fight fair, and we are not going to let you know how we are going to play, and we are going to use any means necessary, and we are going to attack and keep on attacking. And that our enemies are not safe anywhere on the floor.
That is what the Battle of the Coral Sea was really about.
That is what this Big 12 tournament is about.
It is about letting our enemies know that their days of determining what we do and were we fight are over.
Self will use misdirection, and surprise and will pick away at vulnerabilities. There will be rough play. Ford will try one more different scheme, because different looks are what have worked in the past. But bottom line it will be attack on defense, attack in transition, and attack on offense until the different look doesn't matter, until Smart and company understand they are alone in an open court with a team that wants to fight them every which and swarm them and sting them.
Smart and company may win, but this has to be one bloody fight to the end.
Upper classmen have to do this.
Naa, Perry, Tar and Jam Tray.
They have to go on the attack.
The motto for the game: attack everywhere all of the time, then attack some more!
As I use the term, a straw argument posits a position in a discourse to another person that that person did not posit and/or something that is obviously not indicative of his stated thinking, then says that the person is incorrect for positing what he did not posit, nor would posit; this is sometimes done to discredit someone's POV. Some times it occurs out of honest misunderstanding, but is also sometimes occurs out of disingenuousness.
"They are just your opinions and that's ok, just don't try to pass them off as facts why everyone else's are not legit opinions."--JRyman
Frankly, I openly "pass" my stuff off as speculations, hypothesizing and opining, not as facts, not as the whole truth. Facts sometimes trigger me to speculate, hypothesize and opine. So: no, i don't pass my speculations, hypotheses and opining off as facts. Nor do I pass them off as the whole truth, as truth beyond a reasonable doubt, etc. They are my speculations, hypotheses, and opining about things. Not sure why you think that I have to supply "proof" of what I am speculating, hypothesizing and opining beyond what facts and logics I have provided. You are welcome to reject my speculating, hypothesizing and opining based on insufficient proof and/or logical flaws you find, and you don't even have to explain why. But then I am welcome to reject your response, too. That is the nature of discourse about speculation, hypothesis and opinion, is it not?
Also, let me call your attention to one more thing: If this circumstance were already proven, what would be the point of speculating, hypothesizing and opining about it? Further, I don't recall ever saying everyone's opinions were not "legit." Hmmm. that is kind of a large leap, don't you thing?
So, I lean toward characterizing this closing assertion of yours as a kind of straw argument. :-)
Penultimately, I found enough of the rest of your premise, assumptions, and reasoning either sufficiently difficult for me to follow that I decided it was beyond my ability and time to unsnag them meaningfully and so respond meaningfully beyond what I have already posted.
But, ultimately, by gosh, I defend your right to post.
In post script, if you reject my speculations, hypotheses and opining for insufficient proof, that's fine, but please try not mischaracterize what I actually do. :-)
Thanks back to you.
I still feel like Andrew should have dished a few more assists. :-)
Nice back fill.
Next.
Copy and paste. And especially our enemies for if we can make of them a friend, as Lincoln said, is that not as good as vanquishing an enemy?
He was so, so very wise in the midst of his greatest trial.
He was, behind the plain speaking, the greatest of the great.
We needed him bad today. I sensed some spirits wavering. People have been arguing with me like whining girlie men about calling a spade a spade about wiggins' performance in the meaningless WVU training exercise. I will not have the stench of soft thinking stinking up this web site, when there are brave young, most especially Andrew Wiggins, laying their young lives and nearly sorted games on the line for us. The moment I recalled these boys had played the toughest schedule of the last ten years and won their conference with two games to go, despite Embiid badly mauled, and in dry dock, despite Wigs becoming over focused on carrying the team, despite Tar back sliding, I knew Chester was imperative.
Wiggins only made 2 assists in the training exercise in Morgantown, but he will learn from that mistake. Naa always bounces back. He will again. Perry will be shaken from overthinking. There is greatness in him. Selden is a man on two bad knees, but such men are still indomitable. I want Mason in my gun battery and on my break no matter that he struggles at the iron. He is a tiger who will do the right thing when all is on the line. Jam Tray will be explosive whe we need him. CF and Brannen will find their sea legs and make their shots. And so on. Young men in harms way will perform. They have been training for this moment since July. They do not yet know high they can rise, when their leader says, "now, I have taught you everything you need. Now is your time. This is your place. I have every confidence that you will do your duties and say amidst doubters we believed, amidst challenge we prevailed, amidst fear we conquered.
More pure unadulterated JayhawkFanToo.
😀
I actually enjoy watching you calling something BS and then having to resort to straw arguments, because reason and facts are contradicting your inner world.
Do carry on. 😅
Lucas appears to be at that point of development where he knows how to do everything he is supposed to do in mechanical terms, and when everything is unfolding as expected he plays his role soundly, but I believe Landen gets thrown off his game by changes when he is on offense, and on defense. Sometimes it is changes in the other team's offense that make him unsure what to do, other times is its changes in how our offensive actions are changing from what he expected to something else. He is a very interesting case, because for a few minutes he will be rolling along smoothly in sync with the offensive action--looking as good or better than who he replaced in terms of getting to places on the floor and so on. But then there are changes that he does not recognize and he gets out of sync and then cannot get back in. We definitely need him to contribute from here on. We need at least 15 mpg from him with Embiid out, on Tar's good nights, unless Self is going to call up Justin instead. And on Tar's bad nights, we've got to have 20-25 from him. It is a tall order for Landen to get comfortable this suddenly, but that's what we need. Difficult comes easy, Landen, the impossible takes a little longer.
Tar has to take the biggest step up. But he is evidencing the same kind of confusion when the other team has a sophisticated coach capable of running offenses and defenses geared to confuse a big man, as Huggie Bear could do.
But Tar faces the same problem all of our guys do. Tar showed what it looks like to run the offense against a defensive team that did not put on a lot of pressure. But when pressure gets put on, most of our guys lose broad focus of the floor needed to run the offense. Instead, their focus narrows down to just keeping from getting the ball stolen and to make the pass. They aren't seeing all the options, they are just seeing one option. Tar gets rattled and does the same thing, or more often, he tried to run the stuff and people stop following his lead.
It is crucial for this team to follow Tar's lead, or Landen's lead; that is the nature of hi-lo basketball. The three guys out front can play catch all they want, but they don't really start running the stuff until they start following the low post man's lead. They have to get it to him when he calls for it. They have to trust him that his call for it is the best thing for the team. They have to start looking to make plays off his lead, rather than isolating and making plays.
"God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless."--Chester W. Nimitz
Well, yes, slayer, when we take the varnish off, we are talking about a very short, harsh basketball reality the team is about to encounter as this team exits this season's birth canal with a spank from all of us.
"Leadership consists of picking good men and helping them do their best."--Chester W. Nimitz
Self is at his best with his back to the wall and finding ways for guys to do seemingly impossible things.
And he has some chess pieces, same as Nimitz did after the ass kicking at Pearl Harbor and the draw a Coral Sea, and the looming battle at Midway.
People forget that those boys on those four aircraft carriers were inexperienced kids being lead by some officers that were at their best when their backs were to the wall.
"All real Americans love a good fight."--Patton
We know our coach is like Nimitz a gambler when the stakes are highest that gambles to win everything.
We know our coach, like Nimitz, didn't come from rich families, and has come up the hard way through the ranks.
We know our coach, like Nimitz, still has a carrier or two he can mask in the face of overwhelming odds, while Joel is in dry dock back at Pearl.
As a result, this all really does come down to the boys now, as it always does, sooner or later.
WVU was a diversionary tactic. It was a signal to our enemy that you will not always know where and how we will deploy. We took a beating there, but it planted the seed in our enemies leaders that Self is going to make this a war of maneuver and he is going to determine how it will be fought; that you don't get to know exactly how his forces will fight and which forces you will have to match up with to win.
The Big 12 tournament is another maneuver, like reinforcing Wake Island, as the giant, overwhelming enemy fleet approaches that is the 64 teams of March Madness.
War comes.
But Self will decide exactly when and exactly from which direction the decisive battles will take place.
64 teams are an overwhelming enemy when you're destroyers and cruisers are depleted (with bad knees), when your battle wagons are either old, and too light, or one of your carriers is in dry dock being repaired.
But Self has an attack carrier in Wigs. And if he can patch together Selden he has an attack carrier in him. And he can convert Perry to an attack carrier and so move away from his inadequacies as cruiser.
You hit on the most crucial question of all.
Is Tarik Black ready to become the fourth attack carrier, or is he going to stay a tender.
This KU team finds itself in unchartered waters and extraordinary circumstances.
War is at hand, but the decisive battles are, though close, not yet here.
Young men must through their leader realize the gravity of the situation and respond with focused, intense preparation while retaining their swagger.
Young Americans are capable of great things if their leaders are capable of maneuvering them through early disasters to the crucial point of attack.
"Uncommon valor was a common virtue."
--Chester W. Nimitz
At a certain point, there will be a moment of no turning back, of no further maneuver, a moment when great ferocity and sacrifice must become common place and will determine the outcome.
But we are not there yet, even though we are now certain that the decisive battle is taking shape a few weeks in the future.
Now everything is preparation, planning, practicing.
Now everything is trusting training and finding the weakness to attack later with all possible force in the best way for this task force to attack.
Now is deception and feint.
And maneuver.
Now is all hands on deck for the work that must be done to get ready and into position to strike the blow that turns the tide.
Now, is the time for each person on the team to look back at the past season of training, of hardening, of practice battles and to know that, regardless of the recent losses and injuries, that this team is now better prepared than any other team in America to fight and win, for that is the fruit of grueling training.
No other team has played the toughest schedule in the last decade of college basketball.
No other team has had to confront its own flaws as much as this team.
No other team has had to come as far as fast as this one has in its training.
No other team has better prepared players, despite their weaknesses, nor better prepared leadership, despite its likely fatigue.
No other team is better prepared to overcome the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that have hit this team down the stretch and that will hit this and other teams once the Madness starts.
"Some of the best advice I've had comes from junior officers and enlisted men."--Chester W. Nimitz
All are part of the great effort that is at hand.
From the moment they awaken to the moment their heads hit their racks at night, they will contribute all that they have and much that they do not yet realize that they have.
Because they have been through the toughest training of anyone they will meet, they can now focus the full force of their energies confidently on preparation and maneuver in harm's way in order to deliver the decisive blow.
And after they do, their super carrier, Joel Embiid will be back and they will crush their enemies thereafter one game at a time until total victory is achieved.
So help us James.
"Our armament must be adequate to the needs, but our faith is not primarily in these machines of defense but in ourselves."--Chester W. Nimitz
Rock Chalk!!!
The scientific nutritionists are waaaay better than nothing, but the problem with scientific nutritionists is that it is utterly beyond their grant research base, or their typical frames of reference, to think about food consumption in the terms Slayr has take it to.
I was on the frontier of diabetes and talked to a great cardiologist, endocrinoligitst, and nutritionist. They steered me toward a high protein, low carb diet, that worked. But...
They never once framed discourse in the way Slayr just did for people. Never as the hunter gatherer looking in the forest for what's best, never in terms of becoming the processor, never in terms of turning distilled water into an edge, never in terms of the larger picture that you have been living in an advanced economic forest that has evolved to provide you things that are efficient to the advanced economic forest, but neither efficient, nor healthy for you. The advanced economic forest is not out to kill you, it just doesn't care if it does.
Now, let me preempt those that would call what slayr is describing by some discriminatory name, like, oh, he's just an organic, or he's just an obsessive, or he's just a food conspiracy nut, or he's been off the grid too long, or he's not living in the real world, or he just got traumatized by the exploitation of his body in sport, or "look, I've been eating this way forever and it hasn't hurt me."
I am grateful that board rats here are giving our resident dragonslayr an honest listen.
In our advanced economic forest, persons that reduce others to discrediting monikers like food conspiracy theorists, or hip and organics, or what have you, are persons deeply afraid of what they have been overlooking and so are too afraid to give it an honest listen. They resort to simplistic, knee jerk rejection either aloud, or internally. You don't have to agree with slayr, or disagree. All you have to try to do on this subject is open up and consider its reasoning and then make an informed judgement for yourself. This can be hard to do when judging one way might implicate some vulnerability and wrong headedness on one's own part.
More broadly still, to call someone a conspiracy theorist (still my current fav among frozen-think speak) is to say, "I cannot yet think clearly enough about what you have said, so I am going to deal with the overwhelming feelings you provoke in me by killing the messenger, rather than thinking critically and analytically about the message."
It is important to note, as I believe slayr would agree, that he is way out front on this topic. And the cutting edge is necessarily subject to just as many potential mistakes, as the trailing edge, or the middle of the curve. That's the key IMHO.There is no path that is inherently risk free. Conservatism and liberalism and do nothing-ism on any subject have risks. But if one distills slayr's POV on eating, it is to err on the side of what your body evolved to do in the first place, when more recent technological processes are not yielding net benefits they claim. The reasoning is hard to refute and empowering. He is saying about food what our founders said about ideas. Get the ideas about governing ourselves out there and let a whole bunch of free men and women explore them without the impediments of monarchy, or only one axis of private oligarchy removing them from consideration before they have even been considered and tried. We can shorten the bench of ideas in a crisis, but not when not. We can get better faster than the no-thinkers making the same mistakes again and again without any competition propelling them out of their habits.
Great work, slayr.
I have been gutting out posting again, when I was ready to hang up the keyboard, precisely to get some fresh first hand experience from others.
Go, slayr, go!
So we are probably 1 and 1 in the B12 tourney.
The B12 Tourney is meaningless, except as 1 or 2 practice games for learning how to beat muscle without Joel, and more if he doesn't come back.
Pruning back the lion killer luv, Joel gave 12/10 plus rim protection.
Against a short mid major replacing Joel is easy, unless they can muscle and shoot Nova style. Wigs can get an extra 10-30 pts, as needed. The ten Reebs are easy also, to spread around. Rim protection is optional in the first round. Our remaining bigs should play well vs mid majors. The big first round risk occurs only if a mid major has a banger big, or the committee decides to match us against a B10 middie in the first round.
What we really need is to play a long team, like Baylor, in the B12 Tourney, in order for Tar and the team to learn to beat real length without Joel.
Run the stuff through Tar. Let Tar and Wigs play pick and roll.
Lastly, Mason and Conner need huge minutes and Selden needs to rest his knees in the B12 tourney. Selden is why our defense has collapsed. He has lost all of his range to help and most of his pop. He is a shell of himself now. I wouldn't even play Selden. Save what little he has left in his knees for the Madness.
New rule: no one with bedspreads on their legs plays in the B12 tourney. Selden and Greene sit. Period. No matter how bad we get beat.
This is war now and effective maneuver, not supreme sacrifice, is everything till the second round of the Madness.
Run the stuff.
Keep Black on the floor.
Don't bench Tharpe for most of the game.
Conserve TOs normally.
Tell Wigs to dish every fourth drive.
Guard.
Repeat.
We will win one b12 tourney game and two Madnees games and then Joel will play with stress fx heeled at about 80 % efficiency. That gets us to the elite 8.
Beyond that Self has to get clever.
Wikipedia footnotes.
PHOF. I have been picked off first!
Totally switched the Cocks!
Oh well.
Gotta get the aricept out!
Great scoop, Lump!
It means this injury is pretty serious business.
I like the call by Self.
Forget the stupid conference tourney.
Forget the first round. If the team isn't good enough to get through a first round without Joel, then enjoy the off season.
If he is feeling great in two weeks, then he tries to hold it together for four games.
Interestingly, it is reputedly an injury that would be healed in four weeks; this is only two more weeks of rest.
It will be interesting to see if any medical professional tries to explain that logic of only waiting two weeks.
No one's bagging on Andrew. Period. This is a case of collective hysteria.
That being said, the most dumbfounding thing was how KU ran an offense beautifully against lowly TTech, but not against WVU.
Really, I don't see a practical, logical reason for not being able to run the offense that KU tries to run against WVU. WVU is a good young team that is coming on late in the season. You would not expect offensive efficiency to stay as high against WVU as TTech, but there is no reason why you couldn't run the offense against WVU...unless you were told not to. Very puzzling.
Bill Self seems so open to the science of things and to new innovations in the things that create support the athletes that I wonder if there might be some pathway to get him to consider this healthy nutritional component to training. These guys are having sooooooooo much joint trouble. And it seems to be getting worse instead of better.
And your take that weight training professionals are not studying the nutritional factors makes me think that it ought to be explored seriously to improve athletes performances and to minimize the adverse effects of weight training on the players bodies short and long term.
The obstacle is that Self struggles with a weight problem from time to time and has undoubtedly had to eat wrong on the road for most of his professional life, and so now he is going to be resistant to it. But Bill Self has a bad knee he got at the end of his playing days. And if someone could talk to him, or someone close to him, about how nutrition can sharply alter inflammation issues, then that might be a topic very close to him that he might be receptive to thinking about.
It is the strangest thing that people are so resistant to eating healthy. I know I was long a poster boy for resistance to trying to eat healthy. And I came to it so late in life that I am not buying any life extension with my conversion. But I am buying feeling better during my remaining time. It works.
And the way it works is that you change your diet for awhile and you think, well, maybe I can tolerate this. And then you start saying, well, I will eat some of the meat that is clean as a kind of compromise, or slide in the side door approach. And then you start eating the salads and upping the vegetable intake. Then you start saying well I will eat two clean eggs instead of two dirty ones. And then you start saying, well, I will just have one clean egg and some clean egg whites to cut the yoke intake in half. And then you go from frying eggs in butter to frying them in olive oil, to using an olive oil mister. Then you start using clean bread butter and jam, and then less bread, and then no butter and then only jam that is all fruit and no sugar. And then you try to shift off the dirty cereal and onto the clean cereal, and then you shift off the clean cereals to oatmeal and grits, and then you find out that there are a few outfits putting out unprocessed grits with the germ still in them and you realize that it tastes way better than 5 minute grits. And on and on. And you start eating smaller portions of meat, and more chicken and fish. And then you start looking at the fish and saying I don't want radiated salmon from the Pacific, I will take my chances on salmon from the Atlantic, where there maybe heavy metals but no isotopes. And then you read a little and you see that all salmon has a ton of oil in it and so you start looking for smaller portions of fish. And then you start realizing that farmed fish are way more fatty than fresh fish, and then you start moving away from fish to chicken and turkey that is organically grown. But then you keep moving back to unprocessed grains and vegetables grown clean. And then you go on a trip and you start chowing down on road food and hotel food and after the rush of feeling the old familiar tastes then you feel like a log, and you're not moving as nimbly, and you don't feel very good and you get tired faster and suddenly, when you are alone, and looking in the mirror, or out a beautiful sunny day, and you think I would rather feel good than have these old familiar foods and then there is no dieting involved. It is all just preference driven instead of familiarity and dependence driven.
American Cokes with High fructose corn syrup and Mexican cokes with plain sugar was what set all of my change in motion. Bottom line, both are rotten for you, but I noticed that Mexican Cokes tasted a wee bit better and the science was in that high fructose corn syrup was way worse that plain sugar. Think of me as the St. Augustine of eating. St. Augustine was in his youth a debauched human being that partook excessively in every vice then known. But something dawned on him and he began looking for a better way to live and it involved setting not just his mind, but his spirit and his body right. He did such an about face that he seems a hypocrite on one level. But the point was that he made it. He made the change. And it was good for him. And he gave back a lot of good once he made the change. I ate as poorly as a person could eat for 20 years from a health stand point, almost as an act of defiance. I ate the finest cuisines and cooking the world had to offer without knowing that a lot of the great cuisines were just covering up really bad quality food stuffs being used in the cooking. I learned that if I amped up the quality of the meat and vegetable and went back and researched old ingredients used 500 or 1000 years ago in the same chic dishes of today, they tasted a thousand percent better. Onions are actually a really cheap crappy substitute for leeks in some dishes and shallots in others. In any gourmet dish you love with onions in it, research whether leeks, or shallots, were originally used. Substitute the original ingredient and forget the onions for the rest of your life. But once you get hip to food you begin to realize that in some cooking the cuisine itself is the problem, or the ingredients that have been substituted for cost cutting are the problem. And so you begin to search for grand old dishes that if cooked in the ancient ways don't kill you eating them.
I am rambling here, but the key is NOT EVER to diet, but instead seek healthy and great tasting foods. Keep tacking toward healthy and great tasting. Your tastebuds are infallible if you just de-habituate the rotten processed stuff for even a month or so.
slayr's rule of thumb of become the processor and stop eating processed food is where all of this moves to.
He is way ahead of me in the migration, but the point is journey itself is a good one for your soul. There is no perfection to get to. There is only going back to the very primitive instinct of looking through the unprocessed world for really good and tasty things to eat.
It is like becoming a good basketball player.
You don't play basketball to lose weight. You play because you love it. And if you love something you are always trying to get better at it, because it feels good to get better. So you add this little move, and you shed this little bad habit, and you add a bit more squat and you quit going for that little fake, and over time you just keep getting a little better at what you do well and do a little less of what you do poorly, and in time you are net sharply better.
Its the same with food.
You can do exactly what slayr does and have a great diet, but you might not hang on to it. Better to follow his rule, then let it help you make your choices each day as you try to get a little better and a little better at eating what is healthy and tastes good for you. Over time you are going to wind up very near to what he is doing, but it will be yours arrived by your tastebuds and reasoning. You are a hunter gatherer by evolutionary predisposition. You like to hunt and you like to grow stuff and gather it up by nature. It is what you do in a grocery store or a fast food joint. The problem is you are often hunting in a particular forest that just has a lot of stuff that is easy to get, but doesn't taste very good and is sometimes poisoned enough to slowly kill you. What slayr has done is say, "find your self a better forest to hunt and gather in."
Accccc----centuate the positive.
I don't know. After about 30 there, Andrew might have tried a few assists just to give WVU another look, before carrying the team some more. Nothing puffs up a struggling teammate like an easy basket off an assist. As poorly as Wig's teammates were playing, there was never a time when it appeared to me that our guys could not have made an open lay up off a dish.
Another thing you can do, if you really don't think your mates can get it done a lick without you that day is, well, I know its old fashioned, but...
You can get your mates involved with a give and go every 10th, or 20th point.
I've seen guys even do it in the NBA.
A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down/
The medicine go down...
Okay, I will keep playing along here.
In a meaningful game, Self would never have called his last time out with 17 to go. :-)
In a meaningful game, he...
Oh, never mind. Been over all that already. It wasn't a meaningful game and it doesn't amount to diddledy squat in the big picture of what has happened this season, or what will happen.
Still, to participate...
First, there was no offense to play within, so he had to do what he did for the good of the team.
Then Wigs played within the offense on a second viewing.
First they played team defense.
Then there was no team defense to play.
First the team concept has to be junked, when it doesn't work.
Then one is all about the team concept.
Check.
In retrospect, the meaningless game got Huggie Bear $25K.
The meaningless game got Wigs back on the hype radar for the draft and greased for scoring more, if Joel's back goes out quick, or doesn't come back at all.
Here is my prediction for the next meaningful game, if Joel plays.
Tharpe plays a lot of minutes.
Joel goes 13/10 but not more than two blocks, because jumping for blocks is a great way to throw his back out.
Self doesn't call his last time out till late in the game.
Team defense is played a bit more the way it was played against UT-Austin and TTech.
Wigs plugs into the offense.
KU plays more like a Self team.
Wigs scores less than 41.
Huggie doesn't make another $25K off Self.
But If Joel is out for the Big 12 tourney, well, I just don't know.
Have to wait and see what Self has up his sleeve.
Maybe a new defensive scheme?
Or maybe 60 by Wigs and an early vacation in the Aegean?
If Wigs operating outside the offense can outshoot the FG% and FT% of a Top 5 team all season long, plus 6 games in the Madness, while his teammates don't drag his shooting percentage down to beneath the FG% of a Top 5 team, then I want Wigs shooting EVERY SHOT EVERY GAME! Screw the rest of the players. Don't even suit them of if we don't have to. Forget team defense, too. Just outscore them with Wigs. :-)
But in the universe where I get mail, there is over a hundred years of historical record regarding the game of basketball indicating that it tends to make sense to involve the team in the offense. :-)
I dunno, maybe I'm just completely off base here asking you to consider that slayr's claim that it is a team game has some merit. :-)
The whole face saving point here is this: the WVU game was meaningless once Black got fouled up and Embiid could not play. All of this disputing will mean nothing once the real games start up again. Self won't coach the same way in real games. He won't do the same kind of stuff with Tharpe. He won't junk the offense and turn it over entirely to Wigs. It was an anomalous game that really was just an exhibition for Wigs.
Let's think next.
PHOF!
A link to this post should be put on the front page of the web site. Young men need to learn what you have just articulated; this is the truth guys. I am not living the religion totally, but I am moving that direction and it is working.
We all owe the eat healthy movement a huge debt of gratitude, because they stuck to their sound reason in the face of ridicule for being different.
Now, all we have to do is explain to young men that it is manly to eat well and we will be on the way to once again getting America moving in the right direction for all Americans.
Rock Chalk! Slayr Rock Chalk!
"I agree with @Crimsonorblue22, to concentrate in Wiggins 2 assists and nothing else is absolutely and unadulterated BS."--JayhawkFanToo
No! Wait! Its unadulterated JayhawkFanToo!!! :-)
Yeeeeee Hawwwwww!
@JRyman Ooh, thanks for the assist. That's even better!!!! That made my day! :-)
This is a fabulous three frame grab to demonstrate the essence of what's wrong with KU's young defenders.
Greene was supposed to turn the guy into the center of the court, but then promptly gave baseline. It is the cardinal sin in Self Defense. Never, never, never, NEVER let the guy go baseline. And the guy did it on a 180 reverse dribble that should have been utterly easy to cut off had Greene positioned himself and kept him self properly weighted.
Now in Greene's defense (but only a little), notice the black lingerie on his legs. His knees have to be a mess.
Further, did anyone notice just how little pop Selden had left in his legs and he's sporting as much or more black lingerie. I am recalling that wonderful drive he made backside to iron only to go up and barely clear the ball over the rim on the flush. I mean, come on, this is Wayne Flipping Selden, an absolute athletic animal early in the season.
These guys knees are shot!!!!
Even if they knew how to guard, which Selden appears to, and Greene perhaps not, they haven't got enough pop left to keep up.
Add Embiid to the bad knee parade and Hudy has to go back to the drawing board on knees after this season, and recent seasons.
Something has to get better.
"This is a bad defensive team, folks. There's no other way to say it." :-)
Thank you for clearing the air on this. :-)
Without Embiid, or at the very least, Black playing a bunch of minutes, the Defensive Emperor is buck naked against teams 65 and up in the KENPOM.
But it won't always be as bad as it was against WVU.
Self coached that game exactly like someone would to create a point padding performance in a meaningless game for a legendary coach with a $10K beat Self clause.
The defense will be significantly better next game, not because the players are trying harder, but because Self is trying harder.
My honest to god take is that once Black got the two fouls, Self was trying to accomplish two things only:
1.) get Wigs back up the draft lottery standings;
2.) get Wigs ready in case the medical news on Embiid was done for the season;
3.) giving Huggs professional curtesy by letting him cash in the $10K clause.
The last is my favorite part. You have to know that Self's professionalism makes him hate the idea of a school giving a coach a clause to beat him. It violates the code. Self had to have been thinking, oh screw it, if we haven't got a chance to win, let's take care of Wigs and let's let the AD at WVU feel what it is like to cut a check for meaningless game. I just love how it worked out. :-)
Hi Backfill Buddy. Its been awhile since you backfilled. So to show good faith, I'm backfilling you, too, for fun. :-)
First, using Wikipedia for a serious source on basketball strategy is kind of shakey, don't you think, unless they are footnoting folks that do know their shizz? Here is who I found footnoted: Jane Woodlands on Net Ball with a dead link. :-)
Oh, wait, there was a second reference--an ESPN link to a post game commentary on a Dallas Mavericks vs. Miami link that, you guessed it, doesn't mention zone being less taxing to play than m2m.
But, at least you tried, so I will try to.
I'm feeling generous today.
I got my initial wake up call rather late in life from an old board rat at the previous site that I decided knew more about basketball than me, or anyone I had ever met, after he had schooled me and many others repeatedly in a friendly, coach-ly sort of way. And he fessed up that he had coached the game a long time. He also became persuasive to me after he would explain what Self had done wrong in attacking this defense, or that defense, and then Self would come back the next meeting with the same team and do exactly what the old board rat said he should have done the first time. His alias was 100. I have no idea if he was really an old coach, or an old sports writer, or the an in the moon. But he was good, kid, the best there ever was on a board that I have read. Probably the best there ever will be on a board since there's no pay. I'm an entertainer. He was the real deal.
So don't feel too stupid, because I used to think zones were easier to play myself, because of the zones I played in kiddie leagues and high school. But, as I said, I got set straight on that few years ago at the other site. Church league zones, and bad high school and bad college zones, most definitely expend almost no energy.
In fact, some coaches of poorly conditioned teams, or teams with short benches and no ability intent to play sound zone, resort to bad zone defense precisely to rest players. So: to be conciliatory, let me say that your reaction was dead on for bad zones in 6th grade YMCA ball, for one example.
But D1 zones played as one's core defense for any length of time require much more energy to play than m2m. Boeheim's Syracuse zone requires awesome stamina to play. Its easy to understand once you "think" about it and and stop with the reacting to it. :-)
All five players in a zone have to move every time the ball moves and they all have to move quite a considerable distance as the ball is whipped around the perimeter as a high and a low post move through its tracking arc looking for seams. Compare this to m2m, where the ball on defender has to move a lot, the one pass a away guys have to move some, and the two pass away guys have to move very little with each dribble, or pass, all the while threatening the passing lanes ball side.
Back to zone. In order to be ready to move in unison they have to keep their feet moving constantly, which m2m defenders two passes away do not have to do at all, and which m2m defenders one pass away only have to do a little to guard the passing lane.
There is no rest in a good zone, of the kind you witness routinely even in tenacious Self Defense on the back side, because even when you are back side in a zone, you have to track around with the ball, then you have to be ready for passes into the seams and you have to keep your feet chopping so that you are ready to close on penetrations, not just from one man, but from as many as approach your zone. This becomes especially exhausting when you play a Carolina passing offense/high-lo that Self runs where no ball sticking is a prime directive precisely to keep the zone defenders moving their feet constantly.
m2m is only exhausting to guard m2m, when an opponent runs a set with lots of long cuts and picks and runs the stuff for 30-35 seconds each possession. But here's that thing that Self figured outm from the expensive lesson taught him by Shaka Smart. If he gets his guys in as good of condition as a team that tries to do that to him, then his defenders really aren't working any harder than the offenders in all of this chase the rabbit game, and switching done well can completely tip the energy budget expenditure heavily in KU's favor. Everyone is quitting the Princeton System because it is, if played well, bad energy budget management on both ends. Energy depleting zone on defense, a bunch of 30-second sets on defense that take more work to run than to guard.
Back to zone. Another drain is that you are almost always drawn into double teaming that you often don't have to do in m2m unless you have an acute MUD, and then only with two players, rather than intermittently with all five. The double teaming requires constant foot chopping to be ready to move aggressively in timely fashion.
And you have to play the zone standing more upright and with hands over head more frequently, in order to prevent cross court passing to weak side; both of which require more, not less effort than a m2m crouch with a hand check.
Think about Self's vaunted m2m defense. The scheme is to force the ball handler, and as much action as possible to the center of the floor and into the high paint. There, help can come from all sides and an offender is facing a 6th defender--the 3 second clock. Self Defense differs from many m2m's that force the action to baseline, thus using the baseline as a 6th defender. But the key is that Self Defense actually greatly reduces the tendency of defenders to have to cover vast amounts of ground. Self Defense is always trying to turn offenders into where defenders already are, so they don't have to slide far to help. Self Defense tries (and often succeeds) in reducing the effective range of floor to be guarded by funneling action inwards.
Some of the teams that give Self Ball the most trouble are those that are schemed to flank the Self Defense's effort to turn the offense inward. Once a ball flanks the Self Defense's effort to turn it inward, the Self Defense is suddenly under its greatest stress and its defenders are having to slide a long ways and very rapidly to stop the flanking. The best of all possible worlds for Self Defense is for the ball to be turned inward and only one player "runs," not slides, from back side to "explode out of his position" to not just stop the driver, but leap and block his shot. This is what Jam Tray is so good at doing.
But the point of the digression is to make clear that only one guys is making a major expenditure of energy in Self's m2m and he's making it by running, which is way easier than sliding into position. Self defense allows a lot of running for back side help, rather than sliding. Long, hard sliding is the great burner of calories. This is why Self wants guys chasing offenders over the top of picks, or else switching. He wants the ball to go to the middle of the floor and he doesn't want his guys wasting all their calories on sliding. Sliding is for steering the offensive player. Running is for catching the turned offensive player.
But now back to zone.
Watch zone defenders. They are ALL sliding ALL ...THE...TIME, at least if the offense makes an honest attempt to keep the ball from sticking and throws it into the posts in the seams, so as to force the zone defenders to expand, and constract and expand rapidly.
You have to have lots and lots of depth to play zone defense full time.
KU could never have survived playing Boeheim grade zone the year KU went to the Finals with a seven man rotation. No way.
Kentucky couldn't have prevailed playing a zone full time with its 6 man rotation either.
Falling back into a zone to conserve energy, or avoid fouls, is perfectly kosher for brief periods, but if you play zone full time and well, it is a heavy energy budget drain.
To get down to a 7 man rotation, which coaches want to do, because it is typically the optimal way to keep the best players on the floor the most minutes, you almost have to play m2m, even if you have a deep bench that could enable you to play zone.
Boeheim has always kept the cupboard massively stocked in order to play zone full time and he has done that because he is smack dab in the heart of the most populace state on the eastern seaboard where he can get numbers in his sleep.
Basketball is a game that rewards thinking about it, rather than reacting to it. :-)
Rock Chalk! And...
Next.
SigInt (the brief camera shot of treating Joel's injury court side) tells jBIE's basketball spies a whole lot about Joel's back injury.
Observed treatment: Joel laid on his back and a team official treating Joel pulled his right leg over his left and appeared to stretch the lower back in a spiral/twisting motion.
jBIE Basketball Spy Analysis of Signal Intelligence (television broadcasts):
-
Joel's injury seems to be located in the lower back in the frontier between the Thoracic and Lumbar vertebrae.
-
He does not appear have a fracture. No one applies such stretching, twisting motion to any lower back problem related to fracture.
-
Coach Self's quote in the Dodd article indicated that Joel's injury could be healed with four weeks of rest, but, Coach Self added, KU doesn't have four weeks left in this season to rest him. If it were to win the Madness, that would mean about 4 weeks of playing (note: this week with B12 tourney, and then three weeks of two game tourneys of the Madness.)
-
Coach Self also indicates it is more "significant" than a sprain.
-
What seems to be occurring on the video is stretching to stop a muscle spasm, or perhaps more likely an old fashioned attempt at an osteopathic "adjustment" of vertebrae of the lower back to "pop" the lower back; this usually means that some combination of disks, muscles, tendons and ligaments are allowing lower back vertebrae to shift out of alignment. In turn a nerve is probably getting pinched. The pinched nerve causes pain and weakness in the legs for awhile.
-
"Treatments" of cold and warmth and anti inflams, combined with "adjustment" give relief and the sensation of the pain going away after while. Thus we see Joel with a happy face in street clothes apparently suffering no back pain.
-
Alas, the instability can recur at almost any moment of lower back motion and the more stretching and treatments that are applied, the more the constellation of disk, muscle and ligaments that hold the vertebrae in place are stretched to relieve the problem, the more unstable that vertebral region becomes; i.e., the more prone it is to slip out again.
-
The difference between the first hitch in his git along that afflicted Joel and the second appeared to be a much more severe pinching of the nerve that lead to greater pain, and to much more loss of leg strength (i.e., more pronounced limping).
-
Healing involves ligaments and tendons resting until their normal range of elasticity is restored, and then exercises and weight training can be used to re-strengthen the muscles so that the constellation of ligaments, tendons and muscles can hold the vertebrae in proper alignment and prevent the disk and vertebrae from slipping an pinching the nerve.
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If the apparent nerve pinching were not occurring, and not appearing to worsen with each recurrence, he would rest, get treatments and play until it went out again, then rest, get treatments and play again. Alas, the worsening pinching of the nerve is what is probably cause for all the delay, uncertainty about time of return and further diagnostics.
-
jBIE spies indicate that they have had this exact injury themselves when they were young and that it pretty much goes out without rhyme or reason, and leaves one essentially immobilized for a short while. During the adjustment one can actually feel a slight crick, or pop, and then experience sudden relief. Alas, the more it recurs the more likely it is to recur.
-
jBIE spies indicate that there could be some cascading connection between the knee injury and the pressure the braced knee and altered range of motion communicated to the lower back, but, maddeningly, it could also be completely independent of the knee injury.
(Note: jBIE spies of course are completely and wildly speculating here and doing so without any insider information, just the fading recollection of having had such a nagging injury over 40 years ago that still, once in a great while, goes out.)
Rock Chalk!
There are more straw arguments in this thread than what comes out the back end of a combine. :-)
Straw Argument One: someone focused on Wigs assists and nothing else.
Fortunately, no one here focused on Wigs 2 assists and nothing else. :-)
Straw Argument Two: Wigs was bashed.
Fortunately, no one here bashed Wigs either. :-)
Yeeeeeee Hawwwww, I do love it when there are enough straw arguments to stuff a comforter.
Confuciusbate say: straw arguments tend to fly, when biases are exposed and logic masking them won't fly. :-)
God help me, I do love exposing biases so...
Yeeeeeee Hawwwwwwww!!!!!!!!
:-)
Regarding Self's preference for M2M: been over this with a fine tooth comb many times and here is the short form. The great coaches do not play zone, because it means opponents always know exactly where your best defenders will be. In turn, your opponents will always play away from your best defenders and play toward their most favorable match ups on the other side of the court. M2M means your defenders are always moving with their man where ever he goes, but a man defense also allows complex switching and hedging and so vastly more help that is unpredictable where and how it will be delivered. Strategically, there is no question that M2M is the best way to go. Next, in terms of energy budget management, it takes less energy to play a m2m intensely than it does a zone intensely. Zones properly played require players to chop their feet constantly and move in unison constantly. This wears down the legs and leaves less energy for the offensive end. And if you're not going to play intensely it doesn't much matter what defense you play. Play man to ensure you have more energy for scoring on the offensive end and you can continually surprise the opponent with the types and timing and locations where help comes. Play zone to try to take away the close game and control close rebounding. Play zone to minimize fouling, because your players are never chasing. It takes more skill and athleticism to play m2m, but its strategic and energy budget advantages out weigh the zone, unless your m2m defenders are really lousy rebounders. Next.
Marshall is 51; that defines everything about what Marshall will do.
He will go where ever someone will guaranty ten years in college, or 6 years at $4M in the pros, if Stevens were successful with the Celts, which he will be, but not till next year or the year after.
So: Marshall won't be jumping straight to the NBA.
The Koch's could set Marshall up in Wichita for ten years in a blink. and probably will.
The question is who else might in the EST?
South Carolina?
South Carolina born and raised Marshall is a hero at Winthrop in Rocky Hill, SC, and is well known from assisting John Kresse at CoC.
Frank Martin circles the drain there. .41 W&L. Suspended for anger outbursts.
Marshall makes great sense for South Carolina. Give him ten years security and a good contract and he will have South Carolina a basketball power in three seasons and likely a ring in 5 and aged perfectly to dominate the ACC when Roy, Consonants and Boeheim retire over the next five years.
But does South Carolina have the basketball culture to recognize Marshall's ten year worth and would there be room for Marshall and Spurrier in that athletic department?
South Carolina will try hard for Marshall, in hopes of being rid of Frank Martin and icing their basketball future for six years, but the Koch's will guaranty Marshall ten years and Marshall will stay at WSU.
South Carolina will regret not signing Marshall for ten.
Brad Stevens will succeed in the L and Marshall will jump to the NBA after 4 more seasons. :-)
Absolutely.
Everyone wants to win.
All the time.
That means nothing to say that.
Niko Roberts wants to win every time he steps on the floor.
He wanted the bucks.
Everyone wants the bucks.
Not everyone has a chance to use point padding to move back up into the top of the NBA draft.
He also wanted to prove to the world that he wasn't the over hyped underachiever so many have judged him to be.
He didn't start out playing like gang busters yesterday.
It began after the chorus of ridicule that was being heaped on him in his own adopted state.
There was apparently some kind of a pact made by Self and him after Tharpe was banished to a parallel universe and Black had to sit and Perry and Jam Tray could play okay, but not control the boards. The pact was apparently: just take over and see what you can do. Forget about plugging in and running the stuff. Just do what you can do.
Wiggins was listening to people in the stands ridicule him mercilessly.
Some combination of that plus good biorhythms or something propelled him to a great individual offensive performance.
He didn't score 41 because he wanted to win.
He wants to win every game.
Everyone that plays basketball does.
You do.
I do.
Wigs does.
If this team is not weak guard play, poor defense, or whatever else has been discussed (getting out rebounded), then Self should quit recruiting guards at all, quit teaching defense, tell all his players to release after shots, and ignore whatever else has been said.
Of course this team had poor guard play that would have made Andrew's great offensive performance occur in a win. Of course this team played such poor defense that it got down by a huge margin and so determined that Andrew's great performance would occur in a losing cause. Of course, this team needed to rebound better and whatever else has been discussed.
The team has at times played with great intensity and at times played without it, the team has played competitively and not. No matter what the above shortcomings are deleterious to the performance of the team. It needs to play with more intensity and competitiveness, but without the defense, without the rebounding, without skilled guard play on both ends, great intensity and competitiveness will be as wasted as playing without great intensity and competitiveness wastes the other virtues. Many things are half the battle. We are interested in the whole battle. We want competitiveness and good guard play. We want good defensive commitment and intensity. We want rebounding and whatever else has been talked about along with intensity and competitive fire. A good team needs all of the above.
I used to agree with you completely, but over the course of the season I have come to view the team as having great talent and holes in talent, great skills and holes in skills, inconsistent intensity but sometimes great intensity, and competitive fire almost absent in the beginning that is beginning to manifest intermittently.
The team is so young it does not do any singly thing uniformly and consistently well across across all rotation players. Its infuriating, but how it is.
Self never used to put the heels of his palms on his eye sockets in former years the way he does this season so often.
Bill Self has aged this season.
I never really saw him age in a single season before.
It shows in his words.
This team is taking a great toll on him, because he has finally asked himself to do what he has always asked his players to do. He has stepped entirely out of his comfort level.
Some thing great could alchemically occur as a result, just as happens occasionally with players asked to do it.
But it may take a season or two.
If he does throw his rug on the floor and walk off never to return. :-)
They say it for the same reason Self and others note it: because at times he is not aggressive and disappears, when trying to play within the offense.
I understand your consternation. Its like people are doubting his character, or his handler's intentions, when he plugs into the offense, and call him a ball hog when he takes over the game like people want him to.
And I suspect that Andrew Wiggins sometimes views it exactly as you do and with even more frustration.
But what people don't understand, and what Andrew is only beginning to grasp, is that playing basketball in a team framework involves mastering a continuum of activity ranging from individual impact to selfless glue and back again over and over and over, possession after possession, and pass after pass, while playing at a high level of intensity with serious competitiveness.
It is not just about guardian on one end, keeping the ball from sticking, and periodically winding up from 28 feet out front and making an arcing three step drive that opponents are helpless to stop without denying him his strong hand, or if he lets up a little muscling him into missing, or failing those fouling hell out of him.
To become a good basketball player in a team framework requires learning again, at each level of play, and on each team, with each set of teammates and starters and subs rotated in with you how to read what the offense needs from you to keep flowing from once set of actions, within an opportunity set of actions, to the next during a possession until the the hoped for shot opportunity, or go get a basket opportunity, manifests. This is IMHO one of the hardest things to master in sport. Mastery of this insight--of being able to be within the flow of the offense, and at the same time to see it omnisciently as if from above--to be able to know when to enable its flow and to know when to capitalize on its flow--is one of the most remarkable fetes in sport.
Hitting a baseball in fair territory 40% of the time against big league pitching probably is, as Ted Williams said, probably the toughest individual skill to achieve in all of sport.
But learning to play inside and outside the flow of basketball is the single hardest "spatial insight" to gain in all of sport. There are persons that can never gain the insight. The young men you see on a D1 court on a good team that flows fluidly through its offensive actions, not mechanically, or awkwardly, but fluidly and effectively to desirable made shots are extremely rare human beings in the grand scheme. And many of them, no matter their talent levels, struggle with gaining and maintaining the insight. We notice the ones with great talent struggling to gain the insight more, precisely because they seem so awesomely talented in their individual skills and athleticisms.
The truth is that what you are perceiving as harshly and unfairly judging Andrew Wiggins--putting him in a box where he is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't--is nothing more than observing that one of the game's great talents recently is struggling with the gaining of this dynamic spatial and strategic insight.
It is not a character flaw in Andrew Wiggins that prevents him from knowing how to master the simultaneity of staying plugged into and offense and staying aggressive and taking over games. It is a developmental process that he will achieve over time. Kobe Bryant struggled mightily for two season trying to figure out how to do it in the NBA, and probably for another 3 as a starter. And Kobe Bryant is one of the greatest players to ever play the game. Wilt Chamberlain struggled with it endlessly. It wasn't just that Wilt often had less talent around him. He didn't always. He was so phenomenally gifted physically that there was then no blue print for knowing how to plug his talents into an offense without completely overwhelming its integration. Wilt finally figure it out with a brilliant man he could trust--Alex Hannum. And he later perfected it under a man--Bill Sharman--who had learned team play from the greatest professional coach of all time--Red Auerbach--and the greatest NBA big man team player of all time--Bill Russell.
It should not be surprising that Andrew Wiggins might be the hardest working human being on the planet, best teammate, and perhaps the most gifted young player since Lebron, that he might struggle with acquiring dynamic spatial insight in his first season of D1.
It does not mean he is a ball hog. It does not mean he is dogging it until draft day and avoiding injury. Even the greatest pianist in history has to learn how to play with an orchestra of mere mortals of sound and well trained talent.
It means that he is still finding the way to modulate in fine gradations and in real time against a new level of defenders how to transition between impact and glue and back again, how to see who can be made better from his position and who cannot be, and so on.
And for me to say that he can score 41 on a phenomenal night of shooting, but only get two assists in a meaningless loss is not to damn him at all. It is to say as of yesterday, he still does not know how to transcend his team's problems with his incomparably great individual play. It is to master the obvious, not to attack him. It is to say that if Embiid cannot come back for the remainder of the season, Self may in fact have to repeat this experiment a couple more times in the B12 tourney, knowing full well that doing so could get the team beat the second round, because Andrew has NOT been trained to take over the team and help it win with him largely running the offense.
What was learned in Morgantown is that this guy can hang 40 playing largely individually in a game starting basically with about 10 to go in the first half and by inference that he would be capable of 60 if the need arose and he were played through exclusively from the beginning; that's how good Andrew Wiggins is.
But what was revealed was that he still doesn't have the intuitive insight to do this sort of thing and keep his teammates engaged and involved in an effective way. Michael Jordan never was even asked to do this in college and didn't figure out how to do it until well into his 3rd or 4th season in the L.
Why does this matter?
Because good teams beat great individual efforts, no matter if the individual is a great player like Andrew Wiggins, who is genuinely trying (and struggling) with how to master this aspect of the game, or if they are jerkish ball hog, which he most certainly is not.
To play the game at any level and to struggle to merge into the flow of a basketball team, but then to finally make the transition, at any level, in any role, is to understand perfectly what Andrew Wiggins is up against, only at an exponentially higher level of complexity and intensity of competition.
Asking Andrew in March to take over the team and lead it to a ring now, after having basically said it was his job to just learn to be the world's most dangerous second option, in March, is IMHO asking the impossible of Andrew.
But here is the thing.
Self has a history of putting players in uncomfortable situations, and the level of discomfort he afflicts them with is often directly proportional to how good they are.
So: if Self knows that Embiid is a serious question mark for the Madness, I don't doubt a bit that he would foist this on him now.
But no one has produced any quotes or medical opinions leading us to suspect that Embiid is out for the durations, or only minimally capable, when he comes back.
So: until I hear some signal to that effect, the most probable logical thing that happened during the WVU game was either:
1.) Self pulled Tharpe and flushed him permanently to create a situation in which to force Wiggins out of his own personality and into being able to take over a team while plugged into it; or
2) Self decided the team sucked so badly that there was no point to try to win the game and so he decided to give Andrew a point padding game that would elevate the chances of a very good kid that has tried all season long to fit into the team of getting back into the hype-osphere of consideration for the Number One slot in the draft.
Since Andrew did not show many signs of making his teammates better with his dazzling display of offensive prowess, and since Self early on seriously seemed to be trying to get the team to play as a team, I decided on Option 2 as being the most probable explanation of what happened.
In any case, let's dispense with this nonsense that I am trashing Andrew Wiggins, or implying anything improper, or in anyway doing anything but mastering the obvious after a great individual performance mired in a pitiful team performance.
Rock Chalk!!!
Exactly, Wigs was not the problem AND he was not the solution.
And I'm not bashing him at all. He had a great performance in a meaningless game where he was apparently being showcased for draft day. Why does that rankle you so? He could just as easily have shot the ball poorly, right?
And regarding EJ's game, it WAS a way bigger deal. He was playing for a very good team that would get to 30 wins and he helped his team win an important game and did it on knees that had robbed him of much of his natural athleticism. Waaaaay more meaningful accomplishment.