🏀 KuBuckets Archive

IN WHICH @JAYBATE 1.0 FIRST COMPARES THE LEX LUTHERIAN DIMENSIONS OF SELF'S EXPERIMENTATION WITH COMPOSITE 5 VIS A VIS SINGULAR SUPER CENTERS, AND THEN BELABORS A COOKING METAPHOR EVEN THOUGH SOME, ESPECIALLY THE ALIAS ADDRESSED, PROBABLY ALREADY GET IT, BUT WHICH ALL (NARRATOR INCLUDED) CAN AT TIMES NEVERTHELESS BENEFIT FROM BEING REMINDED OF ONCE OR TWICE EACH SEASON IN THE MIDST OF COOKING A SEASON'S TEAM INTO A MEAL

(Author Here, DFW/RIP: as usual @HighEliteMajor is stimulating my thinking, but this particular expressionistic flight of fancy down what might be thought of as a couple of Lewis Carroll's rabbit holes, though referring to his response on another thread, should not be blamed on him. The author is solely responsible.)

First, thx as always for cranking stats on Franken Five AKA Composite 5 and Embiid and Company. Good to get it out of the ethers of the anecdotal. Your approach is imminently useful to clarify the aspect of this use of our big men. It is revealing, too. So: why do I prefer to talk about the Franken Five in terms of "just" the five at the five that also occasionally expand from the 5 position to the 4 position to spell Perry. It is not so as to cleverly overstate the magnitude of the contribution of the five at the 5; this I can assure you. It is, rather, to characterize the fascinating flexibility that the Composite 5 aka the Franken Five brings to this team that other singular 5s do NOT bring to a team.

No matter how good Joel Embiid was, and he was the best KU 5 in my book since LaFrentz (Simien being a prototype forerunner of todays forward-sized center that could do it all from anywhere, i.e., the stretch 5). Even Joel Embiid could not play two positions at once; this is critical in understanding the uniqueness of what Self is in process of creating at the 5. Everyone, you, me and every thinking fan pauses to doubt what will happen, when Franken Five comes up against the great singular true OAD 5. And we are right to do so. All great singular centers make thinking fans worry about the looming threat. We worry because we have historical data points of Wilt and KU getting stopped by UNC in 1957, and we have Kareem and UCLA prevailing in ALL of his college seasons, against whatever an opponent could cobble together to face the dominant, singular super center. We know from experience it could go either way, but outcomes tend to favor the singular super center. The pain of 2012 is still fresh from our loss to UK and an OAD center named monobrow.

We seasoned fans are quick to point out from our conventional wisdom that one simply MUST take into account the cast of characters around the singular super center to get at the essence of it. We always say, well, Wilt had no one worthy around him, where as Kareem and monobrow had great casts around them. In fact, Wilt had a few decent players around him. And in fact, Kareem's cast, while certainly fine players, included no future hall of famers other than himself. And it looks increasingly like Monobrow's supporting cast may not yield any Hall of Famers either. Monobrow himself may not even make it to hall of fame status, though I suspect he finally will. We sentient fans, are mere mortals, and so we are very vulnerable to the mind control of hype about super centers, and their casts. What Coach Self, good defensive fetishist that he is, seems to think is that most coaches and fans think way too little about the opposing cast of players that faced the singular super centers, in making their judgements about what can and cannot happen against such singular super centers. What Coach Self seems to be building toward is a Composite 5 that can morph in a lot of ways to try to find, and exploit, the multi-faceted nature of EVEN a singular Super Center. Coach Self seems to be operating on the assumption that not even a Super Center can be good in every aspect of the game that each of Coach Self's Composite 5 can be good in. But even more intriguing, is that Coach Self also seems to have realized a very, very important limitation of a singular Super Center, even the greatest one: he can't play two positions at once. But our Composite 5 can at any moment play two positions at once.

Coach Self has not come to this Composite 5 lightly, or accidentally. It is a calculated counter strategy IMHO to an apparent recruiting embargo denying Coach Self of a singular Super Center that a coach of his rank should be deserving of getting to coach at this stage of his career. Even dolts understand that in a symmetric basketball recruiting universe, both OAD and singular super center/forward Ben Simmons would be in Lawrence, along with the OAD 3 that went to Cal. And Coach Self would NOT be employing the Composite 5, and Devonte and Wayne Selden might, or might not , be starting. Coach Self's Composite 5 is, again IMHO, the unforeseen consequence of the powers that be having apparently engineered further asymmetry in recruiting.

There is almost an element of the wicked in what Coach Self is undertaking at the 5 whether or not he knows it. Self is messing with the very foundations of the game. He is exploring through Composite 5 if there is a way not just for the best team to win, but for the best player with the best supporting cast to be beaten by lesser players distributed in an existential paradox for the greatest player, the singular OAD super center. And what he is experimenting with in his Allen Field House converted this season to Frankenstein's laboratory with Igor Roberts at his side could not only spread like a vicious Franken virus from Fort Derrick, it could also spread to being applied to all five positions.

To some degree, what Coach Frankenself is doing is analogous to what Lex Luther did to Superman in a now ancient Richard Donner installment of Superman (maybe the second Christopher Reeve installment?). Recall Lex. He was a genius that was denied much in life by an asymmetric order. He was, ironically enough, played by Gene Hackman, who also played the flawed coach seeking a second chance Hoosiers, but I digress. Hackman's Lex wore a piece, instead of plugs. Lex was buying up seemingly worthless California desert east of the San Andreas fault and then placing a nuke in the fault line (instead of using the HAARP array) AND orchestrating Superman's beloved Lois Lane at another point along the fault line, so he had to face an existential dilemma for a super hero.

Lex created an epically diabolical situation in which a super hero could not save both the good world order and save virtue itself (Lois). It was a despicable thing to do in comic book series and I hated the writers for doing it and Donner for agreeing to direct it. There is something about the marvelously civilized Brits to corrupting the best democratic myths for the advancement of their own aristocratic myths, but I digress again.

Why was it so despicable to put Superman in such a fictional predicament? Because it forced, and thereby reduced, the greatest democratic hero of all times--Superman--to having to resort to metaphysical solutions to the real world problems of evil. No hero, not even a fictional comic book hero, should ever have to resort to metaphysical solutions to set the world order right. It is wrong. It impeaches the very notion of the hero in doing so. The hero CAN solve problems with the means at hand in his fictional universe. Its cheating and deception of the basest kind to make heroes resort to metaphysics. What does it mean for a hero to prevail doing something that cannot be happen even in the imagining of our known universe no matter how far in the future we project? Time's arrow goes only one direction; this is the only ultimate constant in the existence of the universe. There is not turning it back. Even the great roman de la roses respect this. Heathcliff and his squeeze Catherine turn into spirits in the rafters to transcend the limits of physical love and this mortal coil. They don't turn back the flipping hands of time. They don't turn times arrow in a cockeyed reverse. If a Bronte in Wuthering Heights can respect Time's Arrow, surely the twit Richard Donner could, too. But, noooooooooooo, as John Belushi said.

Hey, things can go faster than the speed of light. They just cannot start out going slower than the speed of light and then accelerate past the speed of light. If they start out moving faster than the speed of light, then they get to accelerate as fast as they can be accelerated beyond that speed. Its in the fine print of Einstein's theory. Death and taxes are no longer constants. The top 1 percent prove every year that taxes can be avoided to any degree desired. Death? Come on. Have you heard about Magic Johnson? The dude has had AIDS since the 20th Century. And he's looks healthier than Jack LaLane used to look in his prime. With enough money, you can cheat death. With enough money, you can freeze yourself and be thawed for when science has inevitably mastered genetic editing to the point that anyone with access to the technology will be able to inhabit an endless stream of bodies with a digitally reproducible set of neural net re-burns and live infinitely, or as long as one's wealth holds out. Only nit-picking naives refuse to see this change looming imminently among us, as of 2015. But even perma-life is not the same as time's arrow being turned backwards. Time's arrow really is an arrow, unless we discover otherwise. And absolutely nothing points to otherwise and absolutely everything points to an arrow flying forward. Note: I am quite familiar with the notion of time having an aspect of unity that western culture has disaggregated. I have a little Hopi spirit in me. And I have actually read up on time and know at least a little about how it was disaggregated from symmetry, to asymmetry, to X, Y, and Z axis dimensionality, and then into past, present and future concepts. I have read some paranoid treatises on its diagregation and some functional ones also. But none of them convincingly do away with time's arrow flying forward. That arrow is a bitch to avoid. Still, there are many seemingly impossible activities that are possible, even in infinitesimally so at present. Those that dismiss the possible for its high degree of improbability are always underestimating the enormity of the fucking place we live--the universe. Its big. REALLY BIG. Empirically big. STATISTICALLY BIG. So big almost anything can and will occur in it except one thing. Time's arrow flying backwards. Not. Going. To. Happen. I fought with a great mind about this one time. A great mind that had met and bullshitted with about half the great minds of hard science of the second half of the 20th Century. I went this way. He stopped me. I went that way. He stopped me. It was like arguing with the intellectual equivalent of Self Defense. I looked for every crack in the door. Unless we jump shifted into afterlife, which is not about science, he came up with stop after stop. He was good. Really good. Feynman good. But not Feynman. He was an anonymous scientist that had nonetheless met most of the Feyman's of the world and they had relied on him to discuss their ideas. He was even so flexible and brilliant to join me in my efforts to find even an infinitesimal possibility of time's arrow flying backwards. For a time it was like he and I were playing him. Back and forth, endless transition, half court, full court, slow, fast, this dimension, that dimension, pow! bam! biff! bop! crash! Stop! Stop! Stop! It went on intermittently for months. But always the same. He got a stop every time. Time's arrow flows one way. I walked away with the deepest humility I had ever known. I felt a great release. He said sometimes the most rewarding, though never the best paying, discovery is to discover what you hoped for cannot be, what you hoped to find isn't there.

Everyone in their heart of hearts and then in their mind of minds knows that Star Trek transporters are like airplanes two thousand years ago. They are only a matter of time. Even time travel is conceptually possible at some level of technological advancement and so only a matter of time. Everyone needs to read Michio Kaku's book on the limits of the possible to kick the false foundations and walls of ones mind out of the way. But time's arrow? That pointed and feathered shaft only flies only one way, baby. That much I am positive about. Even when one eventually is able to go back and forth in time, time would still be going forward. I'm down with it now. For a long time I was not. Whatever may actually be going on in the universe beyond the limits of our mind's ability to understand at any given time, what ever dances it is actually doing, so far, the limits of the human mind's ability to perceive the universe make time's arrow moving forward ONLY the ultimate physical, existential one way street. Entropy? That is a naive's fairy tale grabbing for something solid on a bad day and then habituating it. Shit organizes and reorganizes all the time. As nearly as we can tell, the universe itself organized out of nothing and then began disorganizing. We just sometimes cannot figure out the pathways of the energy driving organizing and reorganizing.

And Superman making time's arrow go backward by making the earth spin backward was the greatest fictional insult to humanity's deepest myth--the hero myth of all time. But I digress on this insult to clarify with some XTReme Context what Dr. Frankenself is really up to. He is NOT violating time's arrow. He is like Lex Luther creating an existential dilemma for opposing singular, OAD super centers, who cannot be two places at the same time. He is respecting time's arrow and perhaps creating an existential edge for KU basketball at least momentarily, until this stinking designer virus called C5 leaps out of Basketball Fort Detrick at the foot of Mt.Oread.

Yes, Composite 5 may run into a singular OAD Super Center it cannot beat. It might even run into a singular simply very good center it cannot beat. But it could also confront either case with an existential dilemma that no basketball coach is going to be able to pull a Richard Donner on. The best super center may not lose so much to a better team, but to a better composite center--a composite center capable of morphing into two positions, not just one, and then morphing back into one position, not just two. Self's Composite 5 is literally BOTH a hydra headed five AND a shape shifter capable of dividing in two, like Agent Smith in The Matrix.

Now onto the more deliberately prosaic, but more tactilely grounded. :-)

@HighEliteMajor said:

The key will be what happens in a tough game at AFH vs. OU, or on the road at OSU, or KSU? Will Self’s butt pucker? Will he script an attack down the stretch that requires the post feed as the first option?

So: second, your elegantly stated quote referenced above is the acid test of this entire contraption of a team Self has strung together on one of his annual visions of "who we are" and, so, who we can become. One can never become what one is not (note: think of that more as heuristic with Self, more than as a literal law, for taken literally it gets into subtleties that I am no longer rigorous enough of a thinker to wade into). Rather, one must find deep within one's self what one is, so that one can become the very best of that very thing (note: again, its a useful, if not absolute notion).

What I should recast immediately for all is that building a contraption is a too mechanistic metaphor for what Self does with a team. A better metaphor would be a Chef making a stew. And what I hope to do is part the second is simply for board rats to keep front and center that the cooking phase we find ourselves in at any time of the season is just that, and that the dish being cooked is best judged very near season end, and conclusively, only after season's end.

Realize that now, as we approach the end of this ingredient preparation cycle of pre-conference cooking season, this team remains a stew in the making, and we cannot tell if it is going to turn into a robust beef bourguignon that keeps getting tastier as it slow cooks and so nourishes us to a ring, or if it is going to separate into something not worth having gone to the trouble of preparing, and so starves us to the following season.

One pot, slow cooking (your mothers crock pot, albeit now with digital gimcracks on its front, instead of a nice, simple single knob) is increasingly popular in our bit-rate age age of 60-80 hour wage slavery weeks at the once discrete office space, now morphed into a digitally connected cloud nebula of wage slavery with an office space remnant at its hub synching devices and reminding the galactic cloud of its lonely location through a quasar-like packet ping and GPS beacon. The idea of leaving something slow cooking at the memory of a bricks and mortar home, some sustenance that will be warm, ready and more tasty than dictationware-garbled text messages, when/if we ever get back there, is probably now as appealing as buffalo steak on a spit one at the teepee once was to the Native Americans migrating endlessly over the sea of grass with the immense bison herds in synch with weather and seasons, instead of, as we are today, in synch with its virtual equivalent the cloud and its alternately calm and chaotic torrents.

But making a basketball team remains an analog activity. Allen Field House and its Horejsi Center are more kitchens than packages of Stouffer pre-cooked lasagna. They are places where Chef Self makes some really good tasting stuff sometimes, heck, most times.

Some really good analog stews require some separate preparation of sub-groups of ingredients before hand before bringing them together.

My impression is Self is working on a beef bourguignon this season. No one ingredient is intended to dominate. Its the goal of all high-low cooking: balance. One may start with particularly meaty chunks of outside shooting, and a rather thin stock of centers, but in the end of the chef remains an exquisitely balanced beef bourguignon robust enough to stay together, yet combined properly to achieve a taste that is more than the sum of its parts.

Each pre conference game is a taste of the progress not necessarily of the entire stew, but of the progress of its separate subgroups. The sub groups separate preparation is as important as their eventual combination. It ALL matters and this separates the Chefs from the cooks. Chefs can keep everything in mind and orchestrate all together, each in its own time, in time for dinner. The subsequent conference season is a test of whether, once the subgroups are combined and cooked together they hold together, or separate; of whether they taste superb, or so-so, or trigger bitterness. The post season is a cooking competition. Who made the best dish that season by that time of the season?

Currently Chef Self has a front court pot on the burner with one well-aged starter and five situational complements, a back court pot with 1 well-seasoned point guard (Frank), 1 browned but not fully cooked point guard (Devonte), and 1 well-seasoned, short, athletic wing still evidencing highly variable contributions to consistency of the stock (Wayne). Chef Self also has a back up pot with 2 underdone rotation wings (BG and Svi) simmering, each seasoned with long range zest. These pots are on different burners cooking at different paces. Practice is a collection of pressure cookers and pots. The raw ingredients (Diallo, Bragg) get some pressure cooking there, as well as some of the ingredients that did not simmer as quickly as expected (BG and Svi). Games are transfers of the ingredients not into a single pot, but rather back into corresponding clean pots for a brief time to cool and taste the ingredients state of doneness in preparation of combining them altogether in a big pot for the conference season, a couple games before the conference season starts. But even when the subgroups are poured in the single pot to continue to simmer the last couple games of pre conference, Chef Self withholds his secret spices of special wrinkles for that most pivotal time of dish preparation--the now rightly waited patiently for "week of getting better." Here is when the dish transforms alchemically from a stew into Beef Bourguignon, or something bitter. In this magical week Chef Self adds the little tweaks to the spicing and sometimes even a cup of some wine, say some from his coaching cellar, like a cup poured from a dusty bottle of Chateau Iba, or something tasted in another pre conference season stew in preparation of Chef Izzo, or Chef Alford, or what have you. This "week of getting better" phase of the stew where the dish and we become who we are as a dish, but also where we actually are set on a path of continuing a season long slow cook of letting the combined stew then reach its full flavor and consistency.

The distillate of the cooking metaphor?

The kitchen gets hot some times. Some sub groups of ingredients do not reach their full aroma and bouquet before they reach their proper doneness.

How and when Chef Self decides to combine the sub contents into a single pot varies.

How long they must simmer in unison is up to his subjective tastes.

But make no mistake, he has a menu in mind and he is following it and improvising as needed.

Rock Chalk!!!!

Diallo makes KU much better because he complements the Franken Five and we don't have to rely on him except situationally.

But Cal would have to start him with Skal and play him the same 15-20 mpg as Skal.

My hunch is UK would be worse.

Thoughts?

22 points and 20 rebounds from Franken Five, and superior athleticism to a mid major, and a home crowd make it tough to keep KU from quick transition.

Right now the games we need to make us grow are Texas to test our cardio and WVU to test how we cope with a press keeping us in half court slog.

@jayballer54

John Squid, welcome to life with a short stack. It was a medium stack but Skal is playing like a 2AD.

@Blown

Now that IS a funny coincidence.

@JayHawkFanToo

I'm with you. Looks like 2 year project.

Diallo is now in the hell of D1 coaches getting more and more tape of his weaknesses and it's getting harder and harder to do what little he could do initially.

That said, green guys with freakish athleticism usually look better against good teams than cupcakes, because good teams impose an order on a game that freakish athleticism can anticipate and react to., whereas cupcakakes cannot impose enough order for the great with freakish athleticism to feed off of, and green players are too unskilled and inexperienced to impose order themselves. Thus Inexperience with big talent tends to play to its competition some.

Bragg is green with less athleticism but lots more skill, so he can impose some order on the cupcake with his skill and look pretty good. Conversely, facing a good team, he may not show as well, because he doesn't have the freakish athleticism, or experience to offset the order imposed by the good team.

Bottom line is neither green guy seems up to the challenge of being a 30 minute man and cornerstone, because of strength issues, both guys will as their experience accrues, increasingly improve this strange Composite 5 quite a lot.

@JayHawkFanToo

ROTFLMAO

PHOF!!!!

@tundrahok

Oh.

May be you didn't understand.

I was commenting on the total 3ptas for the game. :-)

Nice jump shift, though.

Wayne Selden's concentration comes and goes, like the glow of a lightening bug at night.

When it surges on, it is beautiful to behold.

When it fades off, Wayne becomes hard to see in the darkness.

Let Pastor jaybate 1.0 now lead the flock in a short basketball prayer...

Almighty Basketball God, in scoreboard heaven, where the home team always wins, even inspite of apparent earthly recruiting embargos and asymmetric refereeing, we thank thee with all of our humble, mortal hearts and minds for allowing Wayne to get one of his low concentration games out of his system against a cupcake, instead of against a Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, or Iowa State. Please, dear merciful Basketball God, let Wayne have all the rest of his low concentration games against cup cakes, or against cellar dwellers, or against 16 seeds in the Madness. Amen.

@tundrahok

10 the first half?

OMG! That means we could have shot 20 3ptas at that rate. :-)

Regarding the second half, aren't Greene and Svi supposed to be trifectates?

I agree we don't want to read too much into this one game.

We want to fit it into a pattern.

16 3ptas again is the pattern it fits into.

@Bwag

And in an 88 point game no less.

Golden State, we hardly knew ye.

@DCHawker

THAT'S OKAY IF THEY ARE IN AT THE SAME TIME. THAT JUST MEANS WE ARE GOING TO EVEN MORE OF AN INSIDE POWER GAME THAN WITH PERRY, OUR FORMER STRETCH 4 THAT IS NOW REALLY A STRETCH 3 PLAYING 4.

Its who we are.

The fault is not in our Self, but in ourselves.

WE ARE AN INSIDE POWER TEAM...AGAIN.

IF WE DON'T HAVE GREAT INDIVIDUAL CENTERS, DR. FRANKENSELF GOES TO THE OPERATING TABLE AT MIDCOURT AT MIDNIGHT AT MIDCOURT ALLEN FIELD HOUSE DURING A KANSAS SEVERE WEATHER WARNING AND COBBLES TOGETHER PIECES OF FIVE CENTERS ROBBED FROM GRAVES UNCONTROLLED BY THE APPARENT RECRUITING EMBARGO, STITCHES THEM INTO AN UNHOLY UNITY, AND THEN HAS YGOR ROBERTS RUN THE GURNEY UP THE ROPES WITH PULLEYS UNTIL IT CAN BE STRUCK BY INTENSE BOLTS OF LIGHTENING THAT ANIMATE THE FRANKENCENTER INTO WHAT COMES TO BE CALLED FIRST COMPOSITE 5, AND THEN FRANKEN FIVE.

Ahem.

As any good therapist will tell you, change of ingrained behavior patterns is difficult.

And persons handsomely rewarded for such behavior patterns to the level of the Golden .800 find change especially difficult.

88-46, despite it being vs. a cupcake, is a kind of reward that feels as good to coaches as to fans.

Outbounding someone 44 to 25 after spending last season getting turned into front court effeminates for much of a season feels fabulously good. Have a Havana Stogie with the end properly scissored off and lit good.

Franken Five, the new Frankenstein's monster of Division 1 Hoops 2015-16 season, terrorized James Naismith Court for 22 points and 20 rebounds, finally reaching the 20/20 plateau that I have been suggesting was the next mile stone within reach of The Monster.

As with the original Frankenstein's Monster, our Monster is misunderstood and under appreciated for his manifold virtues and capabilities in unfamiliar form.

Franken Five dominates games almost without anyone even noticing. Imagine if Joel Embiid had scored 22 points and grabbed 20 rebounds! Board rats would have been beside themselves saying, here could be the best KU center developing since Wilt Chamberlain, or Danny Manning, or, well, at least since Raef LaFrentz.

But does anyone lavish love on the Franken Five other than the old blind @jaybate 1.0 that offers The Monster one of his very own Havana's and welcomes him to the table of great KU centers?

NO.

Franken Five is ignored.

Franken Five is ridiculed.

Franken Five is reduced to two players next March.

Franken Five is hounded from game to game, or ignored as a freak that will soon pass from our sights.

Franken Five is even displaced into a position player that does not really exist; that has been replaced by a wished for 3-point shooting dominated team--a team of who we wish to be--not of who we are.

Poor, poor, poor Franken Five.

The Monster only wants to be loved in a cruelly indifferent world that seemingly can neither love, nor understand The Monster.

Woe, woe, woe, if Franken Five.

And yet, The Monster plays on...seemingly determined to be accepted for what he is.

Go, Franken Five, go!!!!!!!

Don't get me wrong.

I can see up to 20 3ptas some games this season (as most prior seasons).

And if we are down 10 with ten to go, I can definitely feel 25 3ptas on our horizon, also (as most prior seasons).

But so far, Coach Self's interesting public profession not withstanding, ummmm, well, there are now two straight bowls of pudding with 16 and now 15 3 ptas, respectively.

I increasingly blame it on Composite 5: 22/20 today.

Hey, we are at 15 3ptas for the game!!!!!!

Its who we are.

Its amazing how often we shoot free throws well against crappy teams that don't tax our legs and cardio. 15-18 so far today vs. the Montana Wildhats. (Warning: ancient Kurt Vonnegut allusion.)

@jaybate-1.0

Now I've been having some fun here, but this game is evidence that Self really is working on the right thing for this team: the long wings--BG and Svi. He knows Devonte can play, so he used a cup cake to try to tune BG and Svi up. Smart move, Coach Self. Those two guys currently are the guys playing the furtherest from the edges of their envelopes, and so the once that could contribute the greatest incremental improvement, AND justify cutting Frankie's, Wayne's,. and Devonte's minutes.

Perry proving he can go soft baseline even against a cupcake.

Come on designer, this was the kind of game Andrew Wiggins would have hung 40 in to improve his draft stock.

Svi showing some point guard feet there

Jam Tray looks like the injury has healed a little.

Yes, 15 3ptas, do I hear 16?

Its possible we could come in at 16 3ptas again. But I am thinking we may get to 18-20 to make sure the next good team...no, Hunter back to the basket!!!!!!

With 7:35 to go we are at 14 3ptas. Sounds about right for who we are. And it works as usual.

Looks like maybe Self told Frank to dial it back and work on dishing out the assists to get some of his mates sharpened up against the cupcake.

What happened to Hunter? Got a start but then got the cryo ice? Or did he get injured. I have tuned in late.

Devonte trying to get back into the starting lineup, but that 4-7 FGAs with two TOs is not making the case definitively.

Wayne is back in the unconcentration function.

Svi is getting a few points, but no reebs again.

Cheick is Cheick at 4 PFs. He gets the Tarrick Award for early season fouling.

Hmmm.

Perry is having his usually strong game against a cupcake.

And fortunately Composite 5 is steady at 17pts and 12 rebounds.

Composite 5 for All American!!!!!!!

Composite 5 is the one thing we can count on game in and game out.

Composite 5 is the center piece of the team--the hub around which everything revolves.

Is it just me, or have we only shot 12 3ptas with 11:18 to go?

@drgnslayr

Thx for posting. Never heard about this incident.

It appears to explain why Pollard can't get a coaching job pro or college. He got into it on national TV with some one apparently sent to do a hatchet job on him.

Gee, I wonder what the subtext was here?

Howling!

P.S. It makes me respect Scott; that's for sure.

Bill, I love you so, I always will

I look at you and see the 4 out 1 in in May

Oh, but am I ever gonna see my trifecta day

I was on your side, Bill, when you were loosin'

I never scheme or lie, Bill, there's been no foolin'

But 16 lousy treys won't carry me till you marry me Bill

I love you so, I always will

And in your voice I hear a three point carousel

Oh, but am I ever gonna hear my trifecta bells

I was the one who came runnin' when you were lonely

I haven't lived one day not lovin' you only

But 16 lousy treys won't carry me till you marry me Bill

I love you so, I always will

And though devotion rules my shot chart I take no bows

But Bill you're never gonna take those trifecta vows

Oh, come on Bill, oh, come on Bill

Come on and marry me, Bill, I got the trifecta bell blues

Please shoot me some threes, Bill, I got the

trifecta bell blues, trifecta bell blues

Shoot me the three, Bill, I got the trifecta bell blues

@wrwlumpy

Wasn't seven angry men about the players Self shortens his bench to in April? Or was it about the guys that get left on the bench?

@RockChalkinTexas

Thx, will do.

Ok, it's the next morning.

Bill gave us a really great night. He gave three point lubricant in every position. He read us the Trifecta Kama Sutra.

We want to wake up smiling and come out and cook him breakfast.

We want to come out singing like Marilyn McCoo...

"Won't you marry me, Bill/

I love you so/

I always will...."

But are we gonna get the Trifecta Bell blues Bill?

You know; the next time someone is long and strong enough to guard the Trey stripe and play our bigs straight up?

Bill, we've been with two timing, Silver Tongued Devils in disguise before. Roy told us he would never leave us even as he was doing heavy coaching petting with Dean.

Bill has talked about Perry playing 3.

Bill promised to play Marcus at 3.

Mario and Marcus were going switch positions.

Bill talked about full court pressing one season.

Bill even talked about running the triangle.

Get this: Bill even ran Andrew Wiggins, NBA ROY at 3, at the 4 a little.

And now before a cupcake Self runs up a signal flag that, well, shucks, ewe know we really ought ta shewt Moore treys.

Question: Does Bill Self Want an Inside Game Bad Enough to Bait the Trap with Trey Talk?

That is the question raised by Basketball Police Department (BPD) Inspector @REHawk--the poster that posts like a coach thinks, because he was one.

The State's Evidence is: KU only shot 16 treys against OSU.

Bill only has to shoot 16 treys and say that's more treys, and board rats roll over on all fours and purr like Fizzouri Tigers in heat.

Well yes 16 is more than 8 or 10 down the stretch when everyone was injured.

But has the inside leopard changed his spots, or not?

What if he works on the inside game against the cupcake?

Or better yet, what if he shoots, hold your breaths now, 20 treys against the cupcake to bait the trap for the next good team he really wants a W with?

@REhawk is over in the only good part of the Show Me State to live and it may be rubbing off!!!!

SHOW US, Bill.

Let's see 25 treys against the next good team on the schedule.

@MackJayhawk

About @jaybate 1.0, me too. Just between you and me, @jaybate 1.0 is someone that is full of himself and goes on too long and needs to be horsewhipped with a treadmill belt from one of Dr. Andrea Hudy's exercise machines. Everything he writes should be reduced to one word: I don't know split pea soup from chipotle-spiced shinola. Why, I would rather eat lint from the Ugg boot of an unbathed Antler than read what that long winded alias that writes sentences that go on too long than I would like scuba diving with a sea lion swimming backwards through an ocean current of whale excreta on a sunny El Niño day off an Ensenada up-welling!!!!

Yours truly very,
@jaybate 1.0

@REHawk

Lol!

I was just thinking the same thing an hour after my last post!

@HighEliteMajor

Nirvana time.

Post Sex smoke.

Post French meal creme brûlée.

Heaven after purgatory.

Amazing what the Golden State Warriors success can do for rationalizing the virtues of shooting the trinity.

Rock Chalk, Bill!!!!!!!

And way to stick to your six shooter, @HighEliteMajor

@drgnslayr

P.S.: I would give almost anything to look like that picture of Riggins, even just one day of my life. Imagine looking that way EVERY day. All man. Self needs to have Riggins come in and meet the team. Even the residual of Riggins in later life would be worth it. The man's life force is as contagious as the common cold.

@drgnslayr

The truly great leave lore...and giant accomplishments.

In high school running for touch downs during games and playing tuba in the marching band during half time.

Running a 9.8 second hundred yard dash weighing 220 pounds in high school track.

And then all the inconsequential accomplishments like the Orange Bowl team of '68 and leading the Redskins to a super bowl.

The beauty of the great is that their giant accomplishments dwarf their lore.

He is just an awesome human being, who has finally turned the fusion that burned within him to a nice comfortable fire with his loved ones now.

Rock Chalk, Riggo, you made it without compromising.

We should all be so lucky!!!!

@wrwlumpy

A film add...

"Harvey" set in a fictional version of Menninger's in Topeka.

!Harvey.jpeg ↗

@drgnslayr

John Riggins was to sport what Ken Kesey was to literature.

Riggins could easily have become the next Clark Gable in film, had he been vain enough and set his mind to it.

To @wrwlumpy and to the rest that contributed pics to this thread....

Thank you, thank you, thank you...you just proved to me that this broken down old ex-pat Kansan has not grown dementedly sentimental about his old homeplace and its beautiful space and remarkable persons.

This thread of pictures come closer to capturing the Kansas I know and love than anything else I have read or seen.

Rock Chalk All Day Long!!!

(Note: I had once to borrow the great tag line given us by one of our own here.)

Fascinating that Luke Walton is coaching this OFFENCE on an interim basis. Who gets credit for developing it?

@Crimsonorblue22

Maybe a little.

@Crimsonorblue22

No one could see Jeff with her either when he was touring Africa with AIA.
Guys take awhile to find the right scent to give off. A wad of money contributes to it, but is not essential.

I know because I started unable to attract and then found the magic.

(Author here--RIP/DFW: I reread this post this morning and realized it just didn't explain what I was trying to get at in this post, so I have considerably expanded it. To those that commented on the original version, I am sorry if this expanded version alters for the worse your prior assessment. But I just had to keep reaching for what I was trying to get at here.)

Remember that Withey sat for a couple years and it looked like he was done for. Scott Pollard seemed to have to intervene for Withey to knock off Self's blinders about weight gain.

Self fell into the muscle ball rut.

He had so much success bulking guys up and roughing up leaner teams that he lost sight of what he had in Withey.

It's also good to remember it was Self who was the first I recall referring to "the eye test." Because he was using it to defend a player, we liked it, but it betrays an identification, an understanding, of the eye test.

And it was Self that insulted Hunter with the book cover shallow assessment of Hunter being a poor man's Withey. What a crappy thing to say about a kid.

Self's language is peppered with judgemental, class loaded words. .

He also tries hard to be jock cool.

He's always in the right threads. He always is nattily dressed. He thinks he is cool. He likes cool plAyers that are characters with swag. The are a reflection of him. And we like him for being cool. Cool is good unless it obstructs seeing human potential.

U.K. had "long cats."

And so on.

Self also likes cracking and swagger.

Hunter is a lot of things, but cool and cracking swag do not describe him.

Self talks to people back east and says we shop in the same stores you do. He says it because he wants them to know he and his guys and his school and his fans are not hick. And we love him for it.

He doesn't need a 30,000 ft house for him and two kids. The house appears a demand to be taken as someone that matters, as expressed through the interplay of large salary and Federal tax code. The financial advisor defines the size of the house and lot up to a point, but beyond that, its all about how one wants to be perceived in other's eyes--not just recruits, but the faculty's and alum's and media's eyes. These are the eyes that matter. Its only to limited extent about entertaining. The richest persons in the world can have total privacy on two acres with a wall and a get away in the Caribbean they mostly don't mention except to their friends and families. Self probably has the getaway in the Caribbean that he doesn't discuss in the media, but the house is about as subtle as a Rollex on fork lift driver's arm at a warehouse in Lawrence. The house stands out. It is the expressionistic embodiment of a man's home is his castle in the Mannerist McMansion Era and now to in the Baroque 1% era of the American renaissance. Castles house kings and aristocrats, nouveau riches and Gatsbys, as Scott Fitzgerald understood, not tanners and hatters and pizza truck drivers. Drive by Tom Pendergast's old joint on Ward Parkway from a different age. It is exceptionally elegant--elegant in a way that Americans, even our biggest crooks today, just can't seem to bring themselves to be any more. Tom was a city boss--and the son of a city boss. He ran a Jackson county machine that was so powerful a President, FDR, and the city bosses that elected him, and FDR's Republican opponents, felt it all their best interests nationally to dismantle the Kansas City machine; that is, until they needed its remnants and Harry Truman and the usual number of dead persons' votes to assure FDRs last election. Tom's house stands out in my memory for its good taste and its paramount location on a processional gateway to and from Tom's town. And yet for all its timeless elegance, it appears a line shack in terms of size compared with Bill's hat hanger. Tom ran a county machine with national influence from the back of a small office. He knew who he was and what he was and so did everyone else, because he was his father's son--a boss descended from a boss. He needed only to please himself finally. Bill Self is the son of public school educators. He is first generation wealth in the age of the Income Tax. Bill Self has to prove himself in a way Tom Pendergast never had to--in a way Bill Self's children will not have to prove themselves. Cool in and of itself is not enough proof. But cool combined with bricks and mortar is a materialistic alchemy. It triggers lasting chops--the appearance of enduring formidability.

Appearances "appear" to count with Self. He "apparently" has an understanding of the superficialities that can be a part of success. Ambitious and successful Americans (and Europeans and every other kind of earthling it appears) have long understood the role of appearance in the attainment of reality behind its facade.

Just as a house is the appearance of socio-economic substance, cool is the appearance of competitive interpersonal substance.

It appears from a remote and virtual observation point that in Bill Self's fecund, hard working and often brilliant mind that talent in quantity X dressed in Cool in Quantity Y has some significant level of advantage over the same quantity of Talent wrapped in quantity X, but dressed in Cool in quantity Y-1.

Withey, whose high school feeds showed considerable volleyball deftness of footwork and reach from the start, apparently was apparently not only not heavy enough, but also not cool enough on the outside either for a long time. Its only a hypothesis, but one has little choice but to posit hypotheses regarding such mysterious phenomena, as Withey and Mickelson, not playing, when prior explanations seem inadequate and wanting.

Withey wasnt pretty, but he wasn't a homely either. I suspect his problem was he was, like Kaun, nice. Perhaps too nice. Perhaps as nice on the floor as he was off it, where as Kaun seemed to master the art of being nice enough off the floor for Self reputedly to find Kaun alone safe around his daughter, while being quite aggressive on the floor. Nice is nice. Its not cool--on or off the floor. Nice is keeps you out of trouble. Nice gets you in good with your friends mom. But nice doesn't man up and take the brace ring from a blue meanie. The only thing short of becoming a blue meanie that can stand up to a blue meanie trying to take your lunch money, or your shot at a national championship, or the Golden 80, appears to be in Self's POV to be COOL.

Everyone has to have talent to compete at a high level. John Gielgud had talent. Larry Oliver had talent. They had the old Shakespearean tradition, too. But it took the working class, hard edged, cool of Cary Grant, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Jack Nicholson and now Daniel Craig to unseat the old order. Old orders die hard. They start out with everything on their side, not just the silver spoon and the trust fund. The entire system favors them.

Throughout history, cool is recurrent means of overturning the old order. And cool that says it connects better with the tradition than the old order does, is almost impossible to stop save by counter coup. Think of FDR, who was the definition of cool from the old order that had to leave the old order, after its rejection of him for polio, and so joined the revolution of the new order. Think of the late John F. Kennedy, who apparently pushed old order a bit too far beyond its comfort zone with his Praetorian Special Forces Guard reporting straight to him and his $4 Billion in Silver Certificates he alone controlled. Think of his late son, John F. Kennedy, Jr., who had the cool, but not the father, or grand father one apparently requires in contending for the kind of power that a succeeding generation seemed willing to bestow on him as well. Cool works. Cool can rule...if it doesn't move too far beyond the old order.

Cool is not a concept. Cool is real. Cool moves mountains. Cool leaves monuments to itself. The founders of the country were VERY cool. Monticello. Mt. Vernon. Not just houses, or palaces. They were monuments too what cool did and could do. A few great mansions of Hollywood. A few great mansions of Newport, Rhode Island. The cool of privateers and Triangle Traders stealing global maritime trade from the masters of global maritime privateering and piracy--the English. A few new mansions of Long Island. The monuments to the cool of currency traders. A few mansions in Grosse Pointe--monuments to what cool accomplished once in the auto industry once upon a time. A few mansions through out the big cities of American testifying to the cool of bosses and gangsters from the era of city machines and prohibition. A few monuments like Graceland. Residuals of what cool can do in music. Now we live in an age of sports dominance. It too is leaving behind its monuments to what cool in sport can do.

Not all talented people are cool.

Just as not all talentless people are uncool.

Cool, which has gone by many names through the millennia, and which seems always to include some helping of charisma, is its own variable--its own driver--its own attribute.

Cool is.

Hunter is peculiar, as they used to say. He may have some cool latent within him, as Withey turned out to have, but so far, as it was with Withey for a long time, it is latent. Hunter has a lot of talent, enough that Self would take him as sloppy seconds during the apparent recruiting embargo era. Look at the others Self has taken as sloppy seconds either as transfers (Withey, Tarrick, Hunter) or as second choices during recruiting (Xavier, Selby) and you can see a pattern of serious talent Self can't resist the challenge of coaching up in the mind/body package it comes in.

Still, just looking at the list of sloppy seconds mentioned above, you can see a pattern. The cool guys play immediately, whether they are ready or not. The uncool guys wait. The cool guys play now. The uncool guys, they have to wait till the cool guys are either gone, or the cool guys prove they just cannot produce at a high enough level for Self to touch what I now call "The Golden 80." In the 40 game era, .800 is the golden mean. Sustain .800 over time and you are golden. Your contract is golden. Your house is golden. Your trust funds for your kids are golden. Your stock and bond portfolio is golden. Your cars are golden. Your wife is golden. Fall short of it--experience too many up and down seasons--and your only hedge is NCs. And everyone knows NCs are a 1 in 6 dice roll with less than a 1 seed, and 1 in 4 dice roll with a 1 seed. Only suckers bet on going 6 of 6, or taking the first two rounds for granted, even just 4 in 4 against the best in the country with 5 positions where DOA mismatch could occur any game, a cold night of shooting could occur any game, and with fighting those odds with 17-23 year old, half-neural netted young males with as much interest in the wild thang as in balling. Only suckers bet on 6 in 6, or 4 in 4 without the right Big Shoe-Big Agency Complex alliance, and without the calls that apparently guaranties.

So; when a cool coach is pursuing The Golden 80, and he lives in the prison of his successful experience, and he has himself been a cool guy with no talent that in D1 and seen he could cut it on lots of cool and almost no talent, well, then who's he gonna start and who's he gonna call first, and who's he gonna let sit? Cool rules with Bill Self. Call it swag. Call it getter-done confidence. Call it cockiness. Call it a pair that slaps like bowling balls in a bull's scrotum. Call it broad shoulders. Call it whatever you want.

But both Jeff Withey and Hunter Mickelson shared the absence of it, when they came to KU.

And both ALWAYS had to sit, when the play was 50/50, while the cool guys played.

Why did Brady play? Was it Roger's money? No. Bill Self's house is probably three times the size of Roger's. Was it lack of talent? No. Behind the clownish, childlike face, Brady had the cool. Brady was "accepted" by the cool guys. Cool is NOT only the package. What we learn time and again from the Humphrey Bogart's of the world is that a man's cool comes through even an ugly face, once his cool is catalysed by the acid test of life. Brady had the cool. He didn't have enough talent to beat Xavier with the look of cool, but not the heart of it, out of starting in a system that requires a steady flow of OAD talent for a coach to chase the Golden 80, but the little bastard--and I mean that affectionately--had the inner cool and enough talent on defense and on the trigger, despite the sleepy eyed look, and short height, to take 20 mpg from him and, in retrospect, expose him for the wildly talented, but half cool guy that Xavier ultimately has turned out to be.

Therefore Hunter has to be quite a bit better to play even a little, until his Cool surfaces, if it ever does, and which it might, though time's a-wastin'.

Cool is not a fungible commodity. Ask any man comfortable in himself and possessing even an ounce of the right stuff. Cool is inseparable from the uniqueness of each man. Cary Grant was cool. But so was Humphrey Bogart. Marlon Brando was cool, but so were James Dean and Paul Newman and Al Pacino. Sean Connery was cool. But so was Jack Nicholson. Cool seems to distill in many cases to a man becoming what he is in full, to borrow from Tom Wolfe, who proved cool can even come in pencil necked, post modern dweebs. Cool seems to come from a man instinctively connecting with the deepest traditions of manhood in the midst of the current order. It makes them both familiar and dangerous, traditional and at odds with the status quo, cooperating and yet competing.

One more thing about cool. It is not always cool. Like a woman that goes to bed beautiful and wakes up rumpled, cool can indeed be awkward at times. It can make fun of itself at times. It makes mistakes. But in the final analysis it always weighs in and influences the outcome. It doesn't always win. Just ask John F. Kennedy. But it contributes unmistakably to the outcome.

And so here's the take away: the cool Mr. Self wants to win more than just be cool, because in his profession winning is the coolest thing of all--the real reasons for swagging in the for first place. And sooner or later, if you've got what the team needs, and Self finally despairs of finding it in the cool guys, Zeke from Cabin Creek gets to play. And sometimes that act of playing, as in the case of Withey, forges the latent cool into something manifest.

To combine cool and nice and money is apparently the ultimate cat nip in men for women. I am thinking here of Warren Beaty and George Clooney. Oh, my!

Jeff Withey surprisingly combines a lot of nice, with significant bones, and some quantity of cool forged by the furnace of basketball competition to be attractive to Kennedy Summers.

No one is perfect. No one is all cool all the time. No one always knows how to use the cool for everyone's best interests.

But the cool is there to be used.

And forged it is not yet there.

Cool is often wrongly assumed not to exist in country boys.

The silver screen is replete with country boys that had their share of cool. Gary Cooper and John Wayne grew up rural. In basketball, Jerry West--the original Zeke from Cabin Creek--and Larry Bird--the Hick from French Lick--seemed at first to have no cool, seemed at first to be stories of the fish out of water in the big cities. But Jerry West and his inherent cool became the sports King of the slickest of the slick--suede shoed Tinsel Town, USA, first as player and then as GM. And the Hick from French Lick? Larry and his cool finally brought America's most tradition and hide bound and proper town to its knees, too.

Cool, as I said, rules. despite its wrapping.

Hunter, baby, keep playing as hard as you can.

Destiny and the sports gods move in mysterious ways.

Keep learning everything the coaches have to teach you and as that learning is processed through the alchemical transformer of the deep self, the world may yet have to make way for the next Zeek from Cabin Creek.

The more unusual the talent, and the more idiosyncratic the package, the longer it takes the world recognize how much it needs and wants it.

@HighEliteMajor

Hunter not being a starter and 30 mpg guy the last two seasons goes down so far as the greatest PT mystery and coaching enigma in Self's tenure IMHO. There is almost certainly a constellation of reasons but it beats hell out of me.

@KUSTEVE

Thx. I didn't know that about my own Buckies. That sounds like the only reason outside health that a guy who has taught players never to quit in a season would quit. Good read.

@HighEliteMajor

Skinny big men, like most players, come in two flavors.

Resourceful fighters that can find ways to compete until they get stronger.

And not very resourceful guys that are going to have to take a year or more to get stronger, because they are not resourceful fighters.

Kevin Young was the poster child for skinny, bigs that are resourceful fighters.

Justin Wesley was the poster child for those that are not.

Neither guy was blessed with much offensive skill, nor did they acquire much through hard work.

But Kevin Young was a resourceful fighter that learned how to play skinny.

Justin Wesley never did and instead tried to get bigger and stronger. But after all of Justins strength work, he was not resourceful enough to learn how to play strong either.

When you lack offensive skills, and hard work fails to acquire them, you have to become resourceful at playing at whatever size you happen to be.

Jeff Withey was a poster child for resourceful fighters among footers. He possessed little offensive skill, and acquired little with his years of hard work. And in the beginning he was not a resourceful fighter either. So they put a bunch of weight on him that appeared to do him more harm than good, and then let him thin back down, and all of the years of scrimmaging against talented bigs and playing overseas, and having his neural nets grow together finally let him discover how to be a resourceful fighter at 7 feet. He found ways to play skinny that worked, once the coaches took off the blinders of what they wanted to transform him into.

Dennis Rodman was a resourceful fighter. He came out of small college ball in Oklahoma with not much more than hops and a motor. At 6-7, and skinny, he hardly seemed a candidate for becoming one of the NBA's great defenders and rebounders. But he was, as I said, a resourceful fighter, who became a more and more resourceful fighter as his career went on. He kept finding ways to play skinny, and then he muscled up and found ways to play muscled up. He never acquired the offensive skills that could have made him one of the all time great players of the NBA, but he became one of the all time great resourceful fighters--guys that could find ways to play with their unimposing morphology at every level of the game against players either bigger, stronger, and/or more skilled than themselves in many ways.

These are, frankly, the most inspiring players in the game to me--much more remarkable than even Big Russ, or Wilt, or Jabbar, or Magic, or Walton, or Bird, or Michael, or Lebron, or Curry.

Bill Bridges and Dennis Rodman seem (to me anyway) far more improbable and mysterious as successes at every level of the game, and for many different coaches, than any of the super stars.

So: why was I slow to jump on the Bragg Bandwagon?

What I saw in Korea made him seem just another talented and skilled big man that would have to wait two years to get big enough and strong enough to capitalizes on those considerable skills, that would then let him get to the NBA. There is nothing wrong with this kind of player. I recognized immediately in Korea that he had a good future, but I saw no sign of a resourceful fighter over there, of someone that could find ways to play and win at his present level of development.

Then the first couple of games of this season, when he scored some and rebounded some, and got everyone else lubricated, I just saw what I saw in Korea fattening up on easy match ups Self had found for him. I saw energy, but no fight; skills, but no fight. I saw no sign of a skinny player that could learn to play skinny when the blue meanies started in on him.

But in the Oregon State game, I saw him a few times in the second half running the length of the floor defense to offense, and adjusting his angle of approach on the defender on the block and explode into him and give him an elbow point to get onto the block himself. That play there revealed a working brain of a skinny resourceful fighter. He was no longer trying to play post the way he had learned in high school, and he was not settling for learning the techniques of the KU coaches. He was instead getting competitive in the moment and looking for SOMEWAY, ANYWAY to get on that spot. Resourceful fighters have to learn how to find the unfair advantage. It is a mind set. It makes you someone persons hate to play against, because you are always doing annoying things to get the edge you need.

The great of edge of playground players once upon a time was that maker-take playground ball confronted one with endless numbers of guys that maybe couldn't play a lick in many ways, but were resourceful fighters (they and their teams could never hold court otherwise).

But resourceful fighters have come from New Mexico (Bill Bridges) and rural Oklahoma (Dennis Rodman), not just the playgrounds of big cities.

Wrapped up inside the talent of the superstars is usually a resourceful fighter, also.

I might even go so far as to say that one of the requirements of great superstars is that in addition to having all the talent they possess, which most of them say a number of lessers also have, they have lurking within them a resourceful fighter. I could go down the list of greats and describe it in everyone of them sooner or later in their careers.

One of my favorite examples is none other the Big Russ. Big Russ after some unchallenged years at the top ran into arguably the greatest player in the history of the game: Wilt Chamberlain. Head to head, Wilt beat Big Russ almost every time they met. But Big Russ was a resourceful fighter. Most slender 6-9 centers that ran into Wilt Chamberlain were soon reduced to hamburger. But Big Russ found a way to beat Wilt by playing through his teammates. And make no mistake about it. The Boston Celtics without Big Russ would never have beaten ANY of Wilts teams. People always find this hard to understand. Why was Big Russ instrumental to beating Wilt and his teams if Big Russ was a 6-9 lightweight that Wilt could usually man handle when he wanted to? The Celtics must have won because of the Jones Boys, and Nelly, and Howell, and Hondo, and so on. NO! The Celtics won because Big Russ forced Wilt to play all five of the Celtics, not just Bill's other four against Wilt's other four. Big Russ fought a superior player, in Wilt, as surely as Bridges and Rodman fought superior forwards, but Big Russ could orchestrate his team into a 5 on 1 battle to beat Wilt. Wilt never scored at will on the Celtics because of the way Big Russ played Wilt. People focus waaaaaay to much on Big Russ's supporting cast being better than most of Wilt's supporting casts. But it was not until Wilt had been schooled by Big Russ and his supporting casts many years, that Wilt himself became a resourceful fighter, too; that was when you began to see Wilt be able to orchestrate his team and give it whatever it needed, plus orchestrate what it needed. Big Russ was not just a great basketball player, he was a resourceful fighter who met one of the greatest challenges any resourceful fighter ever met--Wilt Chamberlain.

As you can see, I place XTRemely High Value on being a resourceful fighter. At the edge of the competitive envelope it is always the competitive edge that means the most and tends to decide who is the champion and who is the runner up among closely matched teams.

Wooden valued competitive greatness above all else.

I believe that term circumscribes the resourceful fighter.

What the Marines came to teach our Jayhawks last season was about how one becomes a resourceful fighter, or at least how to recognize who is a resourceful fighter.

Now, several of our players, regardless of their levels of talent, either are, or have become resourceful fighters--players that find ways to play skinny, or short, or awkwardly, or what have you.

In a battle, you don't get to choose what skills you would like to have and which weapons you would like to have. You have to fight resourcefully with whatever is at hand. You have to be able to recognize which skills and weapons you possess that might be used to turn the battle to your advantage.

All the talent and all the weapons in the world won't win a battle, if the opponent has a match for each of them, and it comes down to resourcefulness in their application.

When I saw Carlton Bragg start not only to fight and claw to get on that block, but to alter his angle of approach and to find ways to knock a guy seemingly to0 big for him to knock off that spot, I said, we've got a resourceful fighter on our hands, regardless of him being mylar in adidas, and this is the kind of man that the Marines are only looking for a few of, to take real estate from those that would stop the greatest experiment in republican government in human history. I saw a guy who is willing to move beyond his skills, and his talents, and find ways to win against guys that it doesn't seem like he ought to be able to stay on the floor with, because he is too damned skinny and weak.

That's what won me over.

Rock Chalk!

@Crimsonorblue22

Health crisis, or burn out.

I RECALL UW IS NOW WITH UA.

Maybe contractual conflicts?