@HighEliteMajor
I saw this before, but the significance did not sink in, as I was preoccupied.
I want to expand a bit on why this melds with my point about attack.
When you are not a great, classic Self Defense team, as your time series stats make starkly clear, you HAVE to adapt.
All guerrilla and terrorist warfare are based on adapting to the inadequacy of ones forces to defend broadly against an overwhelming adversary.
It is not that you cannot defend anything at all.
It is that you must pick and choose where, when and what the purpose of defense is.
Self Defense is about defending everywhere with overwhelming force.
If you cannot defend everywhere with overwhelming force, then you must either defend somewhere with overwhelming force, as we defend close to the basket with Embiid, or you must constantly vary where the point of defensive attack and pressure are applied. The idea is to keep the enemy off balance with defensive counter attacks.
Travis Ford is a little man. He has had to learn all his life about how to attack defensively in a varying way, because he has never been big enough to contain an opponent all over. Thus, when Travis Ford found himself without Cobbins, he adapted with varying defenses that all had one thing in common: vary the point of attack until the the opponent was off balance. This is what zone pressing does. It gives the defensive team an entire court to pick and choose where to unleash the defensive point of attack.
Bill Self was a big guard, not a huge one, not a hugely athletic one, but a big, broad shouldered combo guard that could and did guard you everywhere in order to avoid having to guard you very much at the rim where you could likely out jump him. It is his mind set.
Thus, when Self was confronted with the inability of this team to guard everywhere he resorted rightly to guarding somewhere, but he resorted to Embiid and his bigs guarding close in. It was an entrenching form of defensive attack of the kind Robert E. Lee specialized in, until he realized that it was costing him too much and did not produce decisive victories. Lee made the right choice. He went on the offensive on marches into Maryland and Virginia in search of disruption in the enemy’s rear, in pursuit of his rail pinch points enabling both his interruption of Union troop and supply movements, and giving him access to Washington DC and Baltimore from his hoped for objectives in Harrisburg and York PA, from whence he intended to sweep down rapidly and take Baltimore and Washington and so control the Chesapeake Bay and thus draw the covert ally of Britain into an overt ally.
Lee moved north to Maryland first in hopes of turning largely pro southern state controlling the east side of the Chesapeake Bay, and the rail head of the Baltimore and Ohio, knowing that Lincoln would commit forces decisively to prevent him. He knew taking Maryland depended entirely on the people of Maryland being willing to join in and overthrow the Union occupation of Baltimore, which they were finally not willing to do. But he also knew that if he moved on Maryland first with the eventual aim of taking York PA, that if the people of Maryland did not rally the state to his side, that his Armies could then entrench a small force, sweep west more rapidly that the Union could follow and then turn north moving up three mountain valley corridors, using the mountains as flank screens before breaking into open country in Pennsylvannia, where he would be able to race toward Harrisburg, where the largest Union troop training base logistical warehousing and distribution center was located, and thus hold the necessary supplies, and hold the necessary hostages, to turn south and pick a battlefield to entrench and defend agains the onslaught of the converging, amassed Union Army. From that entrenched battle field he would then hold the Union force at bay and flank with one of his armies, encircle and destroy the converged Union Army and win the war by first strangling off Washington DC from supply, and then depending on Northern response, probably move north quickly by rail to take Trenton New Jersey and its iron works and port where he could contain Philadelphia, and order Confederate Armies in the Carolinas to move north by train to take Washington D.C. and so begin an iron clad based naval blockade on New York and Boston with the by then certain assistance of the British, if necessary.
The point is is that it is hogwash that the South could not have won the war with the sort of limited defensive capacities that it had. It could not defend the entirety of the south because of limited defensive capacity if it chose to remain on the defensive. But it could go on the attack and pick mobile locations in places the Union could not anticipate clearly and could successfully defend and attack, so long as he never overcommitted his forces on the wrong battle field in a head on assault.
Only the foolishness of Jeb Steuart’s cavalry leaving his side undid Lee’s gambit, for blinded by the absence of Steuart’s cavalry, Lee buckled under the pressure, and resorted to his early military training in concentrated frontal assault Napoleonic style, rather than listening to Longstreet’ telling him to withdraw to the mountains to the west, entrench and fight there, instead of moving into Gettysburg. Lee was blinded by the chimera of crushing the Union in Gettysburg and so making use of the narrow gauge railway extending east of Gettysburg that would allow him sudden rapid mobility eastward. It was the same narrow gauge railroad that the Union then used to crush him with logistics.
The point is: inadequate global defensive capability does not determine failure. High mobility attacking defense can work also, and one is regardless, finally at the mercy of one’s mistakes, and at the hand of lady luck in one’s opponent’s mistakes.
KU can turn this situation into an advantage as surely as Travis Ford did once his point guard finally got hold of himself and recommitted to purposeful approach to victory.
