🏀 KuBuckets Archive

@Bwag

There is no question that if Brannen and Svi were fighting for a starting position, Brannen would get it hands down.

Your stats make that clear. Brannen is productive. He was productive against TTech even though his minutes went down.

But they are fighting for back up minutes; that means they only have to protect, feed the post, make two open looks, and guard a 3, or a 2. Rebounds would be a tie breaker if either ever gets to where they can do all the other pre-requisites.

Whenever Self subs either guy with a lead, all he wants is the guy that defends the lead best. Self doesn't look at defending a lead as making shots. Self views defending a lead as lengthening possessions, not turning it over, and our cornerstone players getting a chance to do what they do offensively after the possession has been lengthened; hence, the intolerance of TOs.

Whenever Self subs either guy when behind, all he wants is the guy that gets a board, makes a kick out trey, and protects.

Because KU was always ahead against TTech, Svi got more minutes, because the emphasis was on doing no harm, on reducing possessions, on making no mistakes. When your are running the passing offense, or the weave, to lengthen possessions, Svi gets the nod.

When KU is behind, the stats suggest that BG's PT will go up, because he makes more happen so far.

One more thing: Svi, unlike Brannen, is learning to play an effectively new role. He is learning to be a muscle wing, rather than a tall, play making ball handler. Svi has clearly struggled with the new weight and the role. BUT...

Svi is showing signs of "getting it," just as BG was showing signs of getting it earlier.

Svi appears to hold some advantage, when the defensive pressure gets turned up by the opponent, and more ball handling is required of the back up wing.

Whenever the opponent sits back and packs it in, Self seems inclined to try BG first.

But there is a point at which defensive pressure inside and packing it in inside exposes BG's so-so passing judgement.

Regardless, I think both player has a narrowly scoped role. Defend a lead with Svi. Come from behind, or create a lead, with Brannen.

Beyond that both are improving and as they both improve, Svi will be limited by his inability to shoot the trey reliably so far. Brannen by his occasional wildness.

If we can't make our treys, we're likely to get our heads handed to us.

But man is this going to be a great game to watch and analyse.

Kruger vs. Self = Duel of the Okie Baller Titans.

Tubby vs. Self = Duel of the Maestro of Funnel to Center Defense vs. the Maestro of Clog the Driving and Passing Lanes Defense

Huggy vs. Self = Duel of Two of the Last Three Real Defensive Men (Ratso being the third)

Huggins is like Tubby in this regard: real men don't need to be able to shoot to win basketball games. Shooting is for sissies.

WVU shoots 31% from trey.

If KU can find another 40% trey game in Morgantown and guard hard, KU should win.

But here is the thing: Tubby exposed how to beat KU--take away the driving alleys and the easy shizz over the top. Do that and KU has to hunker down, play through Frank and Perry, and "make plays."

Bob Huggins was taking notes.

And he will try to do with muscle to KU what Tubby did with a Ball Line scheme.

The key to beating KU is: holding C5 to less than a double double, keeping Mason of the glass, and holding KU to less than 40% from trey. Do that, and KU will go down like a rock in a well.

Self is going to have to go to the drawing board, or he is going to have to pull out what he has been saving, in order to get C5 untracked.

Huggy will put a point guard on Frank Mason and tell him bump him where ever he goes on, the minute Frank even thinks about jumping for a rebound.

The big sign on the bulletin board before the game in the WVU locker room will read something like this.

Keys to victory:

--keep Mason off the glass.

--intimidate the skinny children KU plays at the 5.

--guard the trey stripe.

Self and KU have their work cut out for them, but KU's perimeter guys will not have to guard the trey stripe much, which means WVU's going to find it hard to score on KU inside, and KU is going to put WVU on the line plenty, because WVU only shoots 66% from Charityville.

We should win this thing, if we keep our poise up and our TOs down, and find a way to turn it into a FT contest if our trey balling finally takes a dive.

@drgnslayr

I really think the key to recruiting next season is to find some 4 year Jamaris and Landens and a transfer Hunter to begin grooming for continuity the following season. Next season, Bragg and Diallo are going to be monsters and will really only need Colby rotating with them, or maybe one more 4 star.

This is all piecing together beautifully for KU and for all the players involved.

Hey, when ever Diallo starts making defensive and offensive reads of the simplest kind, his PT will eek upwards steadily. But man, he just has no instinct at all for how to play with in any kind of offense. I mean, Self turns the offense down to "See Spot Run" level whenever he is in there now, he just doesn't get the reads, when the opponent is any thing more than a mid major. Diallo literally showed no ability to read Tubby's Ball Line. He moved and passed exactly as if he were playing against a conventional man to man.

Again, this is NO knock on Cheick. There is less reason for him to have a clue about how to play Division 1 Basketball even at the "See Spot Run" level, than there was for Svi.

I really think Svi, Bragg, Cheick and Brannen are going to make a fabulous foursome next season. And I'm psyched about LaGerrie fitting in at the 2.

The key recruiting break through we need is a plug and play 15 mpg guard, like Devonte was, That will really help with depth and continuity.

@Crimsonorblue22 said:

BG has regressed the last 2 games. He was really on an uptick before the OU game.

BG will bounce back. Every time a player still ramping up to full time status has an uptick, the opposing coaches study the video, scope out some more weaknesses, and then a player like Brannen has to go back to practice and remove the weakness. It takes a few weeks, or a month, but then they get back on to doing better.

If Svi's minutes rise, then he will shortly attract the attention of opposing coaches and then Svi will stumble a bit again.

It is an interation all players go through while they are getting up to speed; this is why it is such a bitch to have to start from the beginning. Selden had all this physical ability and so had to start, because he could guard the full range of guys that needed guarding from the beginning. BUT...

Having to play all the time put him in the cross hairs of opposing coaches scheming, and so that is a big part of why Selden has intermittently looked so incredibly bad over the years. He had to have all his flaws exposed when he had to keep playing, and it was very demoralizing at times not to be able to go over and lick his wounds on the bench. It really takes a monster talent in all phases of the game not to become demoralized with D1 players start exploiting one's weaknesses.

Like I keep saying, Diallo and his folks ought to thank God Diallo doesn't have to play every game, because about now he would be being savaged by opposing teams, the media, and fans. And he really lacked the foundation to suffer through. Diallo is exactly where he needs to be right now until next season. 6-15 minutes per game getting the nuts and bolts down; that is, actually entering next season with an existing, functioning foundation, then actually getting better from the interation of other teams exploiting him. If he will do this, the same way Bragg is apparently willing to do it, Diallo will become a terrific player and Bragg and Diallo will just mop up Division 1 for a season.

!iu.jpeg ↗

This is not how i remember them, but it was the only thing I could find on the spur of the moment of them cutting together. This one is probably somewhere up in Washington state, or something. But it gets the idea of the grandeur of it.

!TheGleaners.jpg ↗

@sfbahawk

I am now a late fall chicken for sure.

But I love those old Gleaners the same way I love old American cars from the firsts four decades of the 20th Century. The Gleaner combines were so purely machine based. I have tried to talk my other half into letting me buy and rehab an Old Gleaner to put it out on the back lawn as a sculpture, but she has drawn the line there.

They are etched in my memory vividly from the times my father and eye drove Kansas in summers and saw the custom combine crews working their ways north from Texas to Canada. The same way a boy on the east, or West coast look at the ocean and the ships sailing in and out, or a boy on the Great Lakes watches the iron ore freighters come and go, or the way a boy on the Mississippi watches the grain barges being towed around the bend; that is how I remember the custom combine crews passing through. It was the most romantic life of adventure I could imagine for a couple of summers back in my wonder years. What it was really like was a last vestige, or maybe an echo, of the old cattle drives from Texas to Abilene, or what have you. The Gleaner crews never got a proper tribute from movies, theater, or television. William Inge, or Tennessee Williams, or someone should have done them justice. There have been a movie or two made with them, but no writer ever really understood the majesty and adventure of crews of men and machine harvesting a sea of wheat in an ocean of grass across the heart of an entire continent. I know it was hot, dusty, back-breaking work and the men were often rogues and wanderers and drunks and bar brawlers, but those were the Americans I loved the most in those days of the late 1950s and early 1960s before drugs, post modernism, assassinations, COINTELPRO and the National Security state wrung the residual wildness from America. It was awesome to see 3 to 6 Gleaners carving their way across the vast fields. I still get emotional when I see old pictures of them. And I was really too young to have seen the true Gleaners crews from before 1955, when the Baldwin Brothers of Nickerson, KS sold out to Allis-Chalmers. But their legend lived on in my dad who had grown up with the Gleaners that started being built back in the mid 1920s. They were his idea of romanticism and adventure and he passed them and basketball and fishing and fresh beef to me as among the great treasures of being a Kansan. What I saw was the very, very, very tail end of those wild times when the crews and their trucks and Gleaners were really on their own out in the Great Plains. And the combines were still machines, more mechanical than electrical. No AC. No radios. The Allis-Chalmer's machines that my Dad would get me rides on in the fields looked like this one from a picture in 1965.

!1965_Gleaner_E_on_trailer.jpg ↗

Doesn't look like much now, but at 11 years old it seemed like some combination of a barn storming airplane and land going ship!!!! Just looking at the picture makes me wish I could jump on it and go for another ride up in the grain bin.

I swear. If I outlive my wife, I am buying one and rehabbing it with all the care of someone doing an Auburn boat tail and it is going out in the back yard of my place. They will wheel me up to it in my wheel chair and park me beside it and I will be content.

For what its worth, the name Gleaner comes from the French for harvesting grain, and it has many connotations including efficient harvesting of low yield fields. I knew about this definition, and meaning of the company name, but until this moment I had never looked at the Wiki page for Gleaners and connected the fabulous 1857 painting "The Gleaners" by Jean Francois Millet shown below. Some day, someone will do right by the Baldwin Brothers and make a film about them and their fabulous machines, not a documentary; that would be too base. It has too be a great, great epic about men harvesting continents. Maybe Sergei Eisenstein did something about the wheat harvesting across Eurasia, but probably not with combines. It has to be with combines!

Some times out in the margins of war things are going on the have a great influence on the out come later. Svi and BG seem a side show now, but come March, if either or both get their games down, as the long wing support, KU would go from very good to almost impossible to beat.

Last night, Svi inched ahead in the battle of the once sky high learning the glue Schtick before taking OVER KU next season.

BG has had all the edge of late, but then BG went Pillsbury and baked three flaky pop tarts.

Damn!

But as usual Brannen brought game with the pastries from hell: six points and 4 REEBS in 11 sixties..

However, in 14 sixties, Svi got 7 points, 2 REEBS and a strip, and Svi turned down two scores. And Svi gave Self basketball Maypo, the thing Self screams for from subs--ZERO TURNOVERS.

Thus, Svi may get another nudge in minutes, but let us not mistake what really goes on here.

Self is like a machinist holding two crucial pieces to his grinder of competition and getting them polished up for March and then one dominant reign/rain of three point terror next season. These are two wings that will give opponents willies next season, especially with Bragg and Diallo cramming rare misses back.

@wissoxfan83

Granny deserves a kiss as much as anyone.

It is from her loins and from her will that what the family is achieving sprang.

Ours just died and she was noble, dentures and all.

Tough as nails when the chips were down. Kind as an angel, when some one needed a hand. And contrary as hell the rest of the time. Men felt small, when they let her down, and ten feet tall when they got her approval all the way to the end.

What I wouldn't give to be able to give her another kiss.

@ralster

Agreed. Perry just keeps climbing the mountain and getting better.

It's a big responsibility to have to go win games when you and the rest of the team are struggling against a TTech.

There are three reasons I want this team to win a ring:

1.) add a banner in the FH to keep lifting KU higher;

2.) see all the guys that were not dump truck rank recruits be able to look around after the Finals and the rest of their lives and say, "We are champions;" and

3.) let Perry look around quietly and say, "We were pretty good," and know he did it his way."

Perry Ellis has a chance to be the real life version of John Ford's and John Wayne's "The Quiet Man."

A happy ending for a truly good guy.

@curmudgeonjhwk

Thx. Go Hawks!

@DoubleDD

LOL!

How about Inglorious TeleTubbies?

If a tie is like kissing your sister, winning by 10 over Texas Tech is like kissing your grand mother with her dentures out.

Tubby Smith's Ball Line Defense is a mystery to everyone including Bill Self.

Its not a mystery what Ball Line Defense tries to do. The Ball Line Defense is supposed to clog up the approaches to the basket--both passing lanes and driving lanes--and allow motion at 90 degrees to the basket.

The mystery is how it does it. I've read up on it and I still don't understand how it clogs up. But it does. And it does it every time we play Texas Tech with a bald, glaring middle aged man named Tubby as its head coach.

Bill Self always seems to start each game thinking he has finally figured out how to attack it. KU always gets a few quick baskets early. But then the TTech defenders begin to act like grains of sand and pebbles of gravel in a Texas dust storm slowly working into the gears and pulleys and bearings of a Gleaner and its mechanisms slowly grinding to a halt one subsystem at a time.

Oh, its true that Self sends them out flat as the panhandle, and substitutes till the cows and the defense contractors come back to the barn to drink at the trough. But the bottom line is that it looks like Self could rev them up on Lone Star and Sedafed and script every play, and the Ball Line Defenders would still gum up the works.

Tonight, Self decided that the antidote to the Red Raider Ball Line venom was squirt and grind. By this I mean, if The Tub is going to have all five of his guys clogging passing and driving lanes like plaque in a smoker's artery, then that means everytime KU gets a rebound its supposed to hurry up court and maybe even cherry pick and easy bucket.

To board rats uninitiated in the alchemical rights of the occult Ball Line, they leap to the erroneous conclusion that KU is way faster than TTech and so KU should run every possession. Even the KU players leap to this conclusion. Invariably Tubby encourages this like a sandbagger underbidding at bridge, then intermittently tells his boys to get out run a few possessions and speed up the team that thinks IT is Speedy Gonzalez. Then The Tub pulls in the reins as Speedy Gonzalez pulls his in and the game turns as muddy as a panhandle tank full of a thirsty cattle trying to get cool by wading.

Bill Self invariably has to call time outs, and remind his guys they are only supposed to squirt when there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, not when there is a dust storm.

Finally, Self appears to grow frustrated at the mystery of solving the Ball Line and just tells his two oldest, most reliable scorers to turn it into a half court slog and "make plays."

This Frank and Perry did for Bill.

Thus KU and Bill left Lubbock with a W, and with no more insight into how to beat the Ball Line than how to find a Republican Presidential candidate with a human heart.

But despite the usual kvetching about KU bogging down as usual in Buddy Hollyville, KU exits the land of two hours from everywhere, and four hours from anywhere one would want to go, unless one were half armadillo, with a road W, and this is the basketball equivalent of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow leaving a Texas bank with not only a bag of money, but a combination to the bank vault in the next town.

This KU team now has broken the ice on the road. It has won away. It has stolen a W on a night it shot a warmly familiar 41% from trey on 22 3ptas, but shivered through 42 percent shooting of the "who we are" variety.

Dat ol' Ball Line Magic had'em in its spell/
Dat ol' Ball Line Magic dat dey know so well...

The Ball Line was so mysteriously congesting KU couldn't even really play good BAD BALL.

But enough about that goddamned annoying defense of Tubby's.

How did Self and KU actually finally dust bust these lane clogging Red Raiders?

I mean beyond Self telling Frank and Perry to go "make some plays."

Simple. Self did what any coach would have done in the same position. He decisively out rebounded TTech with his, um, point guard. Yes, little Frank Mason, Jr., all 6 KU feet of him (5-10 in conventional English units of measure).

The discussion must have gone something like this: yo, Frankie, its time again for you to go all Bill Bridges from the point. You know. Double digits on the reebs. Perry will match you, but its up to you to really take the TTech point guard, unmanly thing that he is, to the wood shed on glassvacs, okay?

That was one controllable part.

The other somewhat controllable part was playing some decent defense on TTech 3ptas. TTech only made 25%.

The uncontrollable part--the luck--was that KU really manned up on the free throw defense.

TTech made only 9-19 free throws, 47%.

I don't know about you, but I have always been able to make 6 of ten even with a woman breaking my heart, no more beer money, and acute jock itch.

Tubby is going to have to recruit some shooters. This experiment in playing with basketball players that are unfamiliar with how to release a basketball with more than a random chance of it going in the orange hole is just not working. 47% free throwing is damned near Un-American.

So: that's the low down from Lubbock.

Onward and upward.

And let us now take a moment and prey together that KU does not shoot 29% from trey in Morgantown.

Rock Chalk!

@VailHawk

Each of our players at the 5 has a strong suit, but each one is missing several supporting suits and we have to wait until the next player substitutes to get the other supporting suits.

To try a bridge metaphor.

@VailHawk

Well, its really kind of how I view the way the five players play. Add them up and you get one whole player.

@tundrahok

Frank's rebounding always flourishes on the nights were are bricking treys.

C5 has 5 points and 7 boards.

Tubby's Ball Line Defense is not inhibiting his rebounding, but it is making it very tough for him to get more than 10 points on offense. KU has grown to depend on 14 to 17 points minimum.

Let's hope Self can get C5 untracked.

@tundrahok

Yeeeee Hawwwww, foul C5, foul!!!!

Hield having another good game.

Tubby's Ball Line Defense doesn't look very different, but it apparently IS different.

It gives us fits every time.

Jam ove the back looked clean, but the guy flopped.

@Bwag

It rhymes with "tool's cold."

Once I slayed Sooners/
In three overtimes/
Made shots from three/
Any ol' time/
Buddy/
Can ya spare uh dime?

@Crimsonorblue22

LOL

Life without treys.

All this that love 4 out and 1 in should be feeling smitten right now.

A real live post feed.

All these problems and glitches and we are still up four.

The Law of Averages has suited up for TTech tonight and is making us shoot back to ours.

Perry is the solution.

Finally, we have them right where they want us. :-)

@Bwag

Self getting ready for next game.

Get the ball to Svi. He is the only one that will not be shooting back down to his average.

Never dish on 2 on 2

Svi should have driven it.

Bad choice.

Svi 3

The first half audition at the 5 for KU continues with the Jam Tray.

More face fouling of Frank.

Self is really going to have to start working the refs to get this stopped.

Diallo tentativo.

Bad BAD BALL.

Mr. Outside now Mr. Benchside

Diallo not reading on offense.

Now Mr. Outside.

Inside.

TTech looks like a post-free environment on offense.

Time for some inside junk.

jSPN stringers have scooped the pro journos AGAIN!!!!!

The low down from Lubbock is that Tubby Smith has got to the TTech student body and asked for walk-ons to create Tech's own version of Bill Self's C5.

Tubby has even borrowed the nomenclature and named them his C4.

jSPN stringers sneaked this jpeg file out of Lubbock.

!TTechTubbies.jpg ↗

@JayHawkFanToo

Good point. I have clarified that my take referred to those that get picked for the game.

@Lulufulu

I am devoted to Brandon and want his jersey hanging in the field house.

If he can stay healthy and regain even 90% of what he was, Golden State holds a completely unfair advantage over the rest of the NBA.

Rush and Curry shooting on one end and guarding on the other is just a brutal combination to deal with.

Talent wise, Rush as a sixth man is comparable to John Havilecek as a sixth man. He can't drive it as well as Hondo could, but he can do everything else as well and he is stronger and two inches taller. Brandon is just a great, great, GREAT basketball player. That he can hang on as long as he has with the injuries he has had, is a testament to his XTReme Talent, same as it was for Manning. The beautiful part is this could have a happy ending with Brandon ringing it on the way out.

After posting about game day dinner, I realized game day breakfasts are my decisive basketball food ritual. For big game...

Grits with wheat germ in, seasoned with garlic, Balene sea salt, and tiny dab of anchovie paste (use double boiler, bring grits to boil in upper pan on burner for 30 seconds, then put upper pan on lower pan boiling on medium and covered for 20-30 minutes adding small pours from boiling tea kettle to keep moist, stir after adding water, replace lid)

Two eggs fried at low medium in olive oil and ghee in good stainless steel pan for 2 minutes, then add table spoons of water and cook covered 1-2 minutes to poach yolks, season with personally preferred spice.

Serve eggs on grits. Eggs tender and grits must be creamy.

Thick cut bacon.

Black berries.

Peet's French Roast coffee--strong and black

If coming off a loss, then switch to Eggs Mendel guarantied to create a bounce back win...

Two eggs fried over easy, with eggs still in pan add dollup of cottage cheese and diced shallots, break yolks with spatula and serve immediately (yolk must be bright yellow and runny). Sides of toast and bacon. Coffee or strong breakfast tea.

Self's .820 record is attributable largely to my game day breakfasts. 😄