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Question at large is: Why couldnt we “ugly” this game up? Hack-a-Huggineer with some authority! Make that 1 hack hurt. Make him think about going in for an easy bucket, because you didnt make it easy. Come on, this is the Eddie Sutton part of Self-ball…where we muddy it up, and turn it into a Big10-style (think IzzoBall) bruiser game with a score in the 50’s…(whole point is it allows us to be a couple of possessions away). Self, former Sutton disciple, and former B1G coach himself knows this…but the players need to resort to whatever we have in our playstyle armamentarium.
Notice how Tubby Smith has his overmatched TubbyTechies playing a slow-it-down style that was a 1pt win for KU on a lucky bounce to Wiggins. Sometimes a really good team, on an off night, needs to get its elbows dirty to gut-out a W. Or at least have a better chance at it…
This party of SelfBall (make the opponent ugly) is called “insurance” for when your own offense isnt working. Right now, Ellis and Tharpe are not insurable. They dont help our policy. They give us too high of a deductible. We get way in the negative, then coach benches them, and the whole team has to labor. Which is unnatural, as we have to labor without 2 of our starters, so that may have an emotional impact for the rest of the team.
Man, the starters are called “starter” for a reason. I thought Tharpe took notes from Tyshawn, and not so much EJ. We need the relentlessness on both ends of the floor that Tyshawn showed (just using Tharpe’s contemporary examples, players he personally knows and played with.)
We cant take the next level of improvement, or consistency-jump, if we are still working on the SAME defensive issues all season. To be better, start Mason now, so he gets better with his decision-making. His shot is better than it was, and his D is better outta-the-box than Tharpe. So is his intensity level, which apparently is hard for even Bill Self to coach to some players (Ellis, EJ, Tharpe).
As coach Harbaugh said: “energy tends to find the ball”. Let Andrew Wiggins’ play serve as a shining example of that. Mason was a net positive in this game (slightly. He did make a couple of key errors late…but he’s still learning!). Dont know what to do about Ellis.