Now Hear this: Self Ahead of Everyone As Usual
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The natives–this time the Kansas basketball board rats–are restless.
Why don’t you scheme to your perimeter strength now, Bill?
What are you waiting for, Bill?
I was even out dancing around the camp fire myself for awhile.
And the boom! Just like that he whips out a whole six course first half of long prepared perimeter action meal as good as anything we’ve seen prepared by any of the dribble drive chefs, or any of the more traditional Monsieur d’Treville Tre Mousketteer era chefs to the court of the French king and gunning the long ball a bunch.
Lights. Camera. Perimeter action.
KU running it as if they had been practicing it daily since, oh, I don’t know, maybe the first practice.
Yeeeeeee haawwwwwwww!
Bill has just been working on the inside game, because he knew the outside game was something they could produce anytime.
But boom chack alacka lack. Boom chack alacka lacka.
And cue Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan call and demand to know why Hollywood has not yet cued up a first rate Tarzan with an African American in the lead, or have I missed it. Its outrageous if it hasn’t been done! We need a modern African American Tarzan now as much as KU needs its first African American head coach! When Bill stops dazzling and finessing everyone out of their designer jocks; that is.
Be all that as it may, I do love for once getting to be the great simplifier to relieve everyone’s stress.
And you all know how I resist simplifying that doesn’t fit the facts as much as anyone and only accept the simple when Okham’s razor leaves no non-fitting, anomalous stubble behind, at all.
But in this case, get out the old Winchester strop and give the straight edge of old Bill of Okham a good edge, cause there’s no stubble here it can’t whack.
The bottom line here is that Self–the rhetorically elliptical genius–is just tweaking here and snugging there and wrenching here and hemming up there, and working on his dwarf cybernetic team in silks in real time openly and comically directly under the native’s restless noses.
Face it guys, he’s got the FU money and he is having fun with everyone.
Self coaching against Krystowiak was like Einstein talkin’ relativity with Neanderthal.
Self saved the perimeter offensive action for as long as he could–keeping it away from opposing coaches eyes for as long as he could, squeezing out as many Ws as he could without “the perimeter stuff,” because the other coaches scheme and copy absolutely everything he does the minute he does it.
And while he has been having Team Munchkin keep this year’s perimeter game polished up in practice, in games he’s been very methodically trying to figure out what kind of stuff his dwarf bigs could run, and what his inhibited, battle scarred perimeter guys could run to penetrate. He probably knew from the beginning what would work, but he couldn’t predict reliably when The Big Red Dog and Oubre would evolve enough to know what he might have to work with come March. And they’ve been more than a little bumfuzzled, so Self kind of had to delay the decision of exactly what inside stuff would work, until he knew what they could feasibly be expected to do.
But look at that first half against Utah!!
Utah first half = the best schemed perimeter action and shooting we’ve seen since BenMac. And certainly Self’s perimeter pick’n rolls, ball screens, and fade curls coming of screens devised were so effective that Utah, a team with a PG draft choice on the perimeter, plus a team some predicted to beat KU, not only had no answer for it , but by the end of the first half did not know whether to excrete or erect themselves.
(Note: I know am repeating myself a bit here from recent posts, but I’ve learned over the years that when the natives get restless, sometimes you’ve got to swing on the same vine a few times to break the fevered drumming. Damn! Where is young Denzel when I need him and his handsome, charismatic star power in a black Speedo swinging through the post modern trees of Hollywood and inverting the old racist imagery on itself and making the myth new in a great new positive way? swinging to save us all from a whole jungle full of G7 folks of every color. )
Self’s brand spankin’ new perimeter action completely blew das Utes out by 20 the first half that KU “ran the perimeter stuff.”
And didn’t you board rats here Self?
We just have to find something that the kids believe works inside, or something to that effect, it won’t take much, he said.
Cue the Tarzan call.
What the hell, Bill, put on a loin cloth for fun yourself until I can find Denzel, or Will, or my favorite of all right now Dwayne Johnson. Now I know Dwayne was a Hurricane footballer, but could KU use him in the paint this season or what. And Dwayne is way shorter than he photographs, so he would fit right in with our dwarf bigs.
I have seen the Bill Self with the mischievous twinkle in his eye and that is what I have been waiting for to assuage my fear that he was finally in too deep of quick sand with too short of players.
Up until now I have feared that he really didn’t have a fix, but now its clear that he has been sand bagging inside too.
SELF ALREADY KNOWS WHAT STUFF THIS TEAM CAN RUN INSIDE, BUT HE HAS JUST BEEN HOLDING OFF ON IT TOO!
Trust me. Bill’s got this inside action knocked as surely as Jane loved Tarzan and Tarzan loved Jane, and Cheetah was a comic foil.
He just hasn’t wanted to take the cover off of it until he absolutely had to.
As usual, Bill wants to leave as many wrinkles under the cover, until the conference season starts.
And guess what!!!
He’s made it to 8-1 or something like it, without conference coaches having any feeds to scheme from showing them anything but some perimeter action.
And now he’s got two straight cupcakes and then the week of getting better.
I highly doubt we are going to see this KU team run the actual inside stuff until the first conference game.
If he refused to run it against Utah in that second half of induced labor in the paint, I am highly doubting he is going to give conference coaches anything to study in the cupcake games.
He told anyone who was listening among the natives.
“We’ll come up with something. It won’t take much,” or something like that.
Wink. Wink. Nudge. Nudge.
Never count this guy out.
Never.
I’ve seen him beat teams with bailing wire.
I’ve seen him beat teams with smoke and mirrors.
Now he is beating teams with dwarves WITHOUT SHOWING HIS ACTUAL OFFENSE TILL JANUARY.
HE’S A FLIPPING GENIUS, I TELL YA.
NO ONE HAS EVER DONE THIS BEFORE.
NO ONE.
Go, Bill, go!
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@jaybate-1.0 Hi JB. Been following this site for sometime & always find something new to learn from you. Haven’t commented - until now!! I was shaking my head watching Utes (turned TV off for the UK game). Thanks for showing me the light because something told me something didn’t look right. We ran circles around the Utes, and bombed the 2h? Yes, hot hands then cold hands, but to drop like that? Your explanation is logical, sensible & clear as a bell. Our guys’ confidence and their manhood got striped away with the UK game. Simple, it was humiliation - man’s pride, dignity and respect got stripped away on national TV. They lost it all that day. How would they ever reclaim their manhood? They showed up and found ways to win against smaller teams. But I noticed our players play with FEAR against taller teams after the defeat. Their “FEAR” of another humiliating defeat paralyzed them against 7 footers. I concluded B12 or March run won’t happen with that monkey on their back. With their wounded pride & manhood, I wondered how they’d reclaim their confidence, get gutsy with no fear, and hunger for self-respect. I wasn’t sure until the Utes, and your explanation. It was a beautiful & gutsy strategy by Self. Thanks for enlightening me.
By the way, I love Mason and Graham, but Mason steel. He has NO fear! I think Self sought out new type of guards and got Mason (& Graham) after watching UConn & Louisville getting their NC with Kemba Walker, and Peyton Siva. I hope and pray that our guys armed with their new identity, and overcome any height, including UK. Yes, you’re right - Self is a genius. Often coaches have to a psychologist, right? He saw his boys with their heads low and self-esteem destroyed after UK, and he’s gonna rebuild them - and boy we saw some of that - 1H Utes!!! Can’t wait until Jan!!! Hope Graham can play, we sure need another Mason. Thanks JB for your insight, always!
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thx back at ya.
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Our schedule has not been easy at all and these next 2 teams are ranked in the top 100 (no cupcakes) according to yahoo RPI. What I have noticed is that KU is one of the only teams in the top 10 that have played a brutal schedule and the only team to come out 8-1 against top competition. After the UK game no one would have said we took the next 7 games and won the tiny tourney against the vols and the sparty’s. I think that Bill Self and our team has really navigated through these waters well. Not many of the top teams have a true road game either and most of there schedules are littered with cupcakes! KU is conference ready if you ask me but our Conference RPI is ranked 1st or 2nd in the country so there aren’t any days off or cupcakes there either! If 6 of our conference teams are tournament bound then we will have played 12 tournament games plus the 6-8 we played during our non con.
Our Guys are going to be more than ready come March!!!
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Great info on the our schedule versus all the pretenders.
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And I stand corrected on 'fayette and the Owls. My mistake. They are both respectable. I must have hallucinated the cupcakes. I thought we had two easy ones. NOT.
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@jaybate-1.0 Yeah their both looking to win their conferences and make the tourney. It will look good for us on selection Sunday if they do make it to the dance and we take the next 2 games!
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Thanks for the wonderful dose of unbridled and genuine optimism @jaybate-1.0. Giddy! As my Omi would say “Alles in ordnung”.
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@jaybate-1.0 Ok, two questions. One, what is a fade curl? Im still trying to learn bball terminology and recognize plays live in game. And, by Dwayne Johnson, I assume you mean aka The Rock? Another great post dude. It gets me “amped” That first half of the Utah game!? Sick. I wonder though, why couldnt they reproduce that in the second half? Did they just get complacent with a 20pt lead? Or did Self purposely tell them, stop running perimeter action, were gonna try to pound it inside, the lead be damned?
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@Lulufulu Fade curl is a combo of two concepts – Fade is when you’ll see a cutter move, for example, from baseline toward the wing. With the ball at the top, the cutter then fades to the corner for the pass. It’s very effective when the cutter is coming off a screen, and the defender moves inside. The fade takes him away from his defender. In a true motion offense, the offensive player (usually) has a choice in what he does, based on the defender’s choice. It’s why Self loses his mind sometimes – guys make the wrong choices.
A curl is simply where you curl around a screen in a fish hook shape. A fade curl is when you make a curl cut and the defender anticipates the curl – the offensive player fades back against his initial curl, away from his defender. Fade curl, curl fade. Same thing.
On your question about the second half – check out my post in the thread about Want A National Title: Three Point Shooting. If you scroll down the thread, I responded to @icthawkfan316 and broke down the two halves. Pretty stark contrast.
Actually, I think Self went to the look inside deal in an attempt to preserve the lead, much as a football team might run it off tackle leading by three touchdowns.
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@HighEliteMajor Thanks HEM for that teaching moment. Im a sponge and I rely on you more experienced fellows for teaching. Thanks.
