The NCAA tournament rewards specific kinds of good teams and punishes specific kinds of good teams.
To win the NCAA tournament, you have to be able to play different ways, at different speeds, utilizing different stars. You have to be unpredictable. You have to be able to get easy shots and hit threes. You must be able to defend good perimeter scorers and win the rebounding battle.
If you have specific and obvious weaknesses (inability to rebound, poor FT shooting, lack of depth, etc.) you will get beaten in the tournament because once in six tries you will run up against a team that exposes those weaknesses.
Take UCLA this year for example. One of the best collegiate offenses of all time. Poor defensively, particularly at the guard positions. They get shredded in the Sweet 16 to the tune of 39 points by a PG. They lose.
Take Villanova this year. They were somewhat iffy on the interior all year. Wisconsin battered them physically inside. Season over.
Syracuse made it to the Final Four last year because they switched from their famous zone to a man to man look in the Elite Eight. Oklahoma rode Buddy Hield to the Final Four with their best team in nearly a decade, but then got hammered by a much more complete team.
Look at the title games over the last several years. More often than not, the more complete team has triumphed. That’s not an accident. The most talented, most complete team is most likely going to be the one that survives six very different tests over three weeks.
It’s not just most talented. It’s also most complete. It’s why Wisconsin beat Kentucky in the Final Four a couple years ago. Kentucky was more talented, but Wisconsin was more complete (balanced inside and out, while UK was an interior force).
There will be a game where you can’t hit from outside and need to score inside. If you can do that, you advance. If not, you go home. There will be another game where all driving lanes are cut off and you have to hit some threes or you go home. The next weekend, maybe you can’t do anything and you just have to crash the boards to stay afloat. Maybe you have to lock down defensively against an All American. Maybe you need rim protection.
March exposes flaws because if you can’t find that solution, you lose and go home. The tournament has a way of sorting itself out and leaving you with the team that had the fewest flaws. Maybe that is the best team. Maybe its not.
But everyone signs up knowing the way this works. It’s not like you get to March and everyone is surprised by the format, as if they just introduced it. You know in November how it sets up.
That’s why I argue that the goal should be to make the team as complete as possible, with as high an overall floor as possible, even if that means you have one or two more losses going into the tournament, because you have to survive those tests, and each test is much different and challenging in its own way.
In a way, it’s like the old Mortal Kombat games (apologies to those that didn’t like/ didn’t play them). You would pick your character in single player mode and then have to beat a series of different fighters to win the 1P game. On the first couple of levels, (like the first round of the tournament) you could use one or two basic moves and still win. After that, though, if you weren’t good at executing lots of different moves, the computer AI would basically destroy you if you were too predictable.
And so it went as you advanced further and further. Get too reliant on one move, the AI starts countering it and you lose (lack of depth and creativity). Unable to execute your specials to knock off lots of power (similar to not having big time stars), you lose because you’re barely chipping away at your opponent while they hit you with haymaker after haymaker.
You only won if you could execute lots of different moves effectively. Same here. You only win if you can succeed in a variety of ways and limit your flaws.
Now, let’s look at the last several KU teams and their flaws.
2017 - lack of depth, iffy FT shooting
2016 - lack of a go to scorer, rim protection
2015 - lack of a go to scorer, rim protection
2014 - injuries, rim protection, PG play
2013 - inconsistent PG play, interior depth
2012 - overall depth, team athleticism
2011 - outside shooting consistency, perimeter defense
Now think back to the tournament losses for each of those teams and remember the issues that haunted us in those games. Very similar to that list, isn’t it. Thing is, those problems didn’t pop up in the tournament. They were there all year. They just sunk us in the tournament.
