How Much Longer Will Kentucky’s Phenomenal, Random Luck in Recruiting Last?





  • @KUSTEVE Chicago-Sun stood by that story time after time. Legal action never was brought on them though… Funny how a lot of times after legal threats, nothing comes out of it.

    If a paper really did make a fake story about you, wouldn’t you sue them knowing it was easy money? I mean, of course, providing you had nothing to hide…



  • KUSTEVE said:

    @jaybate-1.0 I wonder how much you get from going to Tucky. I don’t know if it was simple speculation, or somebody had some proof, but AD ( unibrow ) was reportedly given 250k. Of course, we’ll never know because Nike will never be investigated.

    It’s crazy. I see the same dam things on other boards about us.- - Fans saying we are one of the dirtiest schools - -Teflon Bill , Rug head Bill - -how we have been paying players for so long and not getting caught - -this was coming off the North Carolina board this time.

    How EVERYBODY just knew that Zin Williamson was going to come to KU up until this FBI thing – really? - -I sure the hell didn’t know that did you? - -How we are at the center of this FBI scandal and how it works just perfect for them right now in the recruitment for JRE. - -So ya whatever board you go too just saying any board will accuse other schools of paying players



  • @jayballer73 I was merely quoting an article from a newspaper- I wasn’t mindlessly flapping my jaws like the idiots on other boards…lol.



  • KUSTEVE said:

    @jayballer73 I was merely quoting an article from a newspaper- I wasn’t mindlessly flapping my jaws like the idiots on other boards…lol.

    lmao - -yes that they do lol. - - ROCK CHALK ALL DAY LONG BABY



  • @jayballer73

    It’s pretty basic strategy. The Deep State reputedly does it all the time, when the legal apparatus in a state has been convulsed, or high jacked.

    Do the shit.

    Say the clean opponent does the shit.

    Use controlled media to echo chamber.

    Do more shit.

    Say the clean opponent did that shit, too.

    Use controlled media to echo chamber.

    Keep doing the shit.

    Keep repeating the clean opponent did the shit.

    Keep echo chambering with controlled media.

    Pretty soon audience believes both sides do the shit even though they don’t.

    The question is why don’t people LEARN this is what is going on?



  • @jaybate-1.0 I think it appeals to some reflexive desire for balance and equity when there is none. A defense mechanism, call it Stockholm syndrome syndrome, or “how the Republicans have managed to retain low income voters”. Especially in a largely populated world where ones apparent reach seems inconsequential, your choices are to change your reality, something you believe to be impossible, or to change your perception, something that can happen with much less personal effort.



  • @approxinfinity

    That is a very insightful explanation.

    Thanks for sharing it.



  • I worry less about Kentucky all the time. Look at the one year Cal won, 2012. Anthony Davis single-handedly won that trophy, and he did it with his defense. Davis is an anomaly… a guy with that kind of talent who took over games on defense.

    Defense is tough to teach these revolving door teams and without defense, it’s a tough path to a title.

    Many people believe Coach K is one of the best coaches in D1. Look how bad Duke’s defense looked last year. It’s tough to get that top creme to buckle down on defense.

    When comparing us to Duke and Kentucky, I like where we are today. We continue to go after the top players and we get some, while we still build a base with other players. I continually see Self learning and growing with the game. We are in a great place! Let’s just get this fed probe out of the way…



  • @drgnslayr

    Nova is arguably the bigger threat.

    So long as TPTB allow a team to amass supposedly “lower ranked” talent that can beat the BeJesus out of higher ranked talent, who cares about UK, Duke and KU, right?

    I mean, I would much rather have Nova’s roster last season, than ANY 9-10 OAD/TAD stack of recent years.

    “Lesser talent” like Nova’s is the ONLY talent worth having!!!

    Power to the “lesser talent”!!!

    “We’re through the looking glass here, people. Black is white and white is black.” —Jim Garrison, in JFK



  • I think Wright might be the best coach in D1. He gets his players onboard and they execute. All other teams, including us, often try to gloss over the game with pure talent.

    As long as Wright continues to bring teams to March that will execute, they will be a tough out and are bound to stack up more trophies.



  • @drgnslayr

    What changed Jay Wright from a career .600 coach for 15 seasons, to the best coach in the game the last three seasons?

    Has such a transformation ever occurred before?

    To put it in perspective, it would be like Lon Kruger (.610), Cuonzo Martin (.606) , or Fran Dunphy (.639), suddenly winning 2 rings in 3 years and turning into the best coach in the game with less high ranked talent than K, Cal, and Roy.

    How did this happen?



  • @jaybate-1-0

    Wright got ahead of the game. His teams have been playing with the long ball for a while, but without the quality of shooters that they have had recently. As a result, they were a decent, but up and down team. Adding more consistent shooting changed their team. Wright hasn’t really changed his style. It’s just that his style ended up being where the game was going. Now everyone else is chasing him instead of the other way around.



  • @justanotherfan

    Logic (3 > 2) and success (Nova’s 2 rings in 3 years, plus KU’s Final Four appearance without trey balling and an inadequate big man rotation) suggest everyone ought to be chasing Wright, but few appear to be.

    Look at Coach Self for just one example.

    After a FF with trey ballers, he reloads with six bigs and not one probably with a >39% trey, even though Jay Wright won it all with TWO such bigs. Self has emulated ring winners’ innovations in the past. Why not now?

    Not one of our new perimeter guys has a high probability of being a > 40% trey shooter, unless one holds his trey attempts way down.

    Self lost severeral > 39%ers on the perimeter and did not replace what he lost, much less increase his allotment of trifectates. And his recruiting gave no indication he was striving for six trifectates.

    Next case: Cal at UK and Konsonants at Duke, who appear to get some where close to their picks (e.g., Cal reputedly got the 1, 2 and 3 ranked players this year) from the Nike-lean trough, did not even appear to try to load up with 6 > 39% trey shooters. They did not appear to try to sign two > 39% starting bigs. Why not?

    3 > 2

    Trey shooting bigs pull even the best defensive bigs away from the iron.

    This is not rocket science.

    Konsonants won one ring with a trey balling team back when Jay Wright was still a .600 career coach.

    Konsonants knows how to do it, but he appears not to be scaling up his trifectation consistent with Jay, especially inside.

    Only Jay Wright seems smart enough to master the obvious and scale up his number of trey shooters, especially inside and even more amazingly only Jay Wright seems smart enough to find 4 of 6 > 39% trey shooters from 75-100 rank players that can miraculously guard and rebound against teams loaded with 1-75 rank players to the point of crushing them.

    I get it. Anyone with half a brain gets it. Recruit 6 > 39% trifectates, including two in the post, and shoot +10 3ptas. Get all but two of them from 75-100 rank players, and win a ring!

    In some ways, it is eerily similar to when ONLY Cal was smart enough to have first 6 OAD/TADs, and then 10.

    Only Cal was “smart enough” to sign 10 OAD/TADs. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

    Are D1 coaches really this intellectually challenged?

    It’s truly fascinating to watch unfold…AGAIN.



  • @jaybate-1.0

    The difference is one of philosophy.

    Jay Wright encourages his guy to keep shooting, even if they are shooting poorly. He doesn’t bury them in the bench or yank them out, so they keep shooting and improve.

    A lot of coaches see a guy shooting >33% and yank him out, or tell him to stop shooting. It undercuts that player’s confidence and he stops shooting, or struggles in other aspects (defense, ball handling) because he’s lost confidence in his shooting.

    Mikal Bridges and Donte DiVincenzo both shot poorly as freshmen, but still saw their roles stay consistent on the season. As sophomores, they saw their minutes increase and their percentages go up. Last year, both of those guys hit on 40% of their attempts while hoisting over 200 threes each.

    That’s a credit to Jay Wright’s coaching. Those guys struggled with shooting as freshmen, but he kept encouraging them to shoot (even while playing Bridges 20 mpg on a national title team).

    That’s a huge confidence boost to shoot below 30% as Bridges did while playing decent minutes for a team trying to win a title, and yet never be discouraged from shooting.

    How many D1 coaches can/would do that?



  • @jaybate-1.0

    I’m just throwing out my opinion on this without being sure… but maybe Wright started recruiting just a bit better talent. Still not going for the top tier where attitudes have to be addressed.

    A small shift in talent will show up in a big way if all the players are truly “bought in” to the coach.



  • @justanotherfan and @drgnslayr

    I am not doubting Jay’s basketball and coaching IQ. He is a good, experienced coach like those career .600 coaches I have mentioned above.

    But recently, Wright appears a coach that has developed a scheme to fit a number of 3pt shooters (6 to be specific including two in the paint) that no one else can come close to matching, regardless of what rank of players they recruit.

    Has any other coach signed 6 >39% trey shooters including 2 at postman?

    Can either of you think of a single coach in D1 that would decline signing 4 trey shooters on the perimeter AND 2 in the paint? I can’t. Especially two bigs that can guard, rebound and run the floor as well, or better than, all the D1 bigs that can’t pot the triceratop!

    Doesn’t this situation strike either of you as conspicuous AND odd? At least as odd as Cal’s 6-10 stack rosters?



  • @jaybate-1-0 Here’s something interesting to think about. Look at the 2015-16 Jayhawks that lost to Nova in the Elite 8.

    Three ball shooters? Two bigs, Ellis and Bragg at 43% and 57% respectively. I understand Bragg’s attempts were way low, but I think we all can agree that he could shoot from the outside and if given the opportunity, he could have threatened the 35-40% range as a big, stepping out to shoot. Heck, some thought (including me) that Diallo had reasonable outside shooting ability too. He had a nice shot.

    Lucas and Traylor, of course, were … uh … Lucas and Traylor.

    Then our other guys - Svi 40%, Selden 39%, Mason 38%, Graham 44%, Greene 49%, Vick 47% (low attempts).

    If we played Ellis and Bragg, with the intent of attacking the perimeter, is that not exactly what is being discussed? Did we not have a roster capable of that exact type of attack?



  • @jaybate-1.0

    I look at Nova and I think first about defense. They always know what to do to beat another team, and they execute. Last March, they shut us down on the perimeter. Time before that, they shut down Perry in the post with a clever pinch double-team.

    Let’s think back to Self’s one single NC. We won largely by executing during the game. When we needed to change, we did. Suddenly Rush is at the top of the key defending.

    As in basically everything in life, “execution is king!”

    I think many people think it must be easy to execute… after all, our guys are practicing a lot. But let’s remember the age of our team and just how much pressure is on them all the time! Huge crowds…

    I would like to know how Jay gets his guys to execute at the level they do.



  • @drgnslayr Jesse Newell had a big article last year concerning our team’s lack of perimeter defense. And it bit us hard in the Nova. What bit us even harder was facing a superior defensive team in the Final Four…a team that blanketed the 3 point line. We’ve all seen 3 point shooting teams flame out in the tournament ( Notre Dame, Dook ) due to the fact they just didn’t defend that well, and sooner or later, the 3 point shot doesn’t fall. You could even group our team last year in that category… the thing that makes Nova so special is their defense. They shot horribly from 3 against Tech, and still won by double digits. I know it will never happen, but if Bill ever tries the NBA, Wright would be my favorite pick by a mile to replace him.



  • @jaybate-1-0 How about Western Kentucky’s fantastic recruiting run? Snags Coleby away from KU, nabs Mitchel Robinson, now Bassey. 🤔



  • About that Robinson kid🤣



  • @HighEliteMajor

    Self appears to have tried to have 6 trifectates that could out-defend, run the floor, out-rebound and dominate Carney opponents, especially from the Elite Eight on (note: same as he has tried to sign 6-10 OADs including at the 1 and 5 spots), but for some reason Self can’t and Jay can.

    Think about it. Brannen and Carlton wouldn’t have made it into Nova’s Top 6 rotation, would they? Brannen couldn’t guard and Bragg was either too skinny to lock down Elite Eight grade bigs, so over-balasted with synthetic weight gain, that he could hang with regular season opponents much less Carney grade bigs!

    Bottom line: not even Cal and K can sign six trifectates that can guard, rebound, run the floor AND shoot > 39% from trey.

    Why can Jay do this, but no one else can, even when they try, like Self, at an elite school?



  • @KUSTEVE

    Basketball is a game played on two half courts.

    One half is offense.

    One half is defense.

    Fine offensive teams with modest defense lose, when they meet a team good on both ends.

    Fine defensive teams with modest offense lose, when they meet a team good on both ends.

    The objectives are to be as good on both ends as possible.

    No team but Nova has ever fielded a rotation with six > 39 % 3pt shooters, including 2 starting postmen.

    Many teams have been solid, or even super defensive teams.

    Nova was so great, because it had unprecedented 3pt shooting coupled with exceptional defense, good rebounding, and exceptional team speed.

    With only one or the other end covered, that Nova team would not have won a ring.



  • dylans said:

    @jaybate-1-0 How about Western Kentucky’s fantastic recruiting run? Snags Coleby away from KU, nabs Mitchel Robinson, now Bassey. 🤔

    —————

    Anomalies logically beg for explanations of why they occur by those bearing costs asymmetrically.

    I haven’t studied WK, but it appears to need research to find an explanation.

    The need for explanations, combined with the capacity for explanations to make many persons reject the legitimacy of anomalous phenomena, is why TPTB spend so much to control the explanations by controlling courts and media.

    TPTB want to be perceived as legitimate, so most will willingly comply with the biased outcomes TPTB enable that serve their agenda and interests.

    It is much easier if we go along willingly (that is called “power”), than if they have to make us comply with “force.”