Self Rediscovers Phog, or Your Bullwhip Won't Be Much Use from Here on, Indy



  • @jaybate-1.0 Fascinating theory. Self taking pages from Phog’s book. Being so utterly unfamiliar with Phog’s book I’ll just take your word for it. Btw, does Phog have a book defining his theories?



  • @Lulufulu

    Yes.

    By Forrest Claire Allen listed used on bookfinder.com.

    Basketball, (Athletic Institute series)

    Better basketball; technique, tactics and tales

    Better Basketball;: Technique, Tactics and Tales, (Whittlesey house sports series)

    My Basket-ball Bible

    http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?keywords=Forrest+Claire+Allen&new_used=*&lang=en&st=sh&ac=qr&submit=

    Ask and ye shall receive. 🙂

    He also wrote:

    Coach Phog Allen’s Sports Stories for You and Youth.

    http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?ac=sl&st=sl&ref=bf_s2_a5_t1_13&qi=XiRBh5UnsBKdl91RRhoAjt2ZgKg_1420144435_1:559:2124&bq=author%3Dforrest%20g.%20phog%20allen%26title%3Dcoach%20phog%20allen%27s%20sports%20stories%20for%20you%20and%20youth

    Alas, this children’s book has become very collectible.

    Around the same time–late 1940s and 1950s, LIU Brooklyn’s great coach Clair Bee made a career out writing the Chip Hilton stories and others. More relevant though is that Clair Bee also wrote important basketball coaching books about strategy and tactics and pioneered coaching clinics on same. Bee had an .824 career winning rate, at LIU. He ended his college coaching career in 1952, when the CCNY point shaving scandal eventually implicated some of his own players on LIU also. LIU shut down its basketball program and Bee moved on to coach briefly in the NBA. Bee was a great influence on Bob Knight, who reputedly defended Bee against corruption charges and argued that Bee was one of the greatest basketball minds produced early on in college basket. I would highly recommend getting one of Bee’s basketball strategy books though I confess it has been so long since I read one of his books that I would have to reread one to comment intelligently on his contribution. Clair Bee is the next guy I will study in depth, if I ever get around to digging into this stuff again. My recollection was that Bee’s game–spanning the 1930s to 1950s explains much about what came to be called New York ball, as practiced by Clair Bee and also Frank McGuire, which Larry Brown grew up amidst. And it was McGuire that went to UNC and hired Dean Smith before McGuire got run for improprieties.

    Basketball has such a rich tradition and it is still sufficiently short that one can still hope to appreciate it in its full breadth, unlike so many other subjects.



  • @jaybate-1.0 Thanks!



  • @jaybate-1.0 - the " all trey " theory is really interesting. And I can’t tell if you’re joking or not! What I would like (LOVE) to see is the Ol Roy fast break offense. The instant the opponent has a made basket, the ball is thrown back in play and 3.9 seconds later we are laying the ball in or dunking it while the defense wonders what the hell is just happened.

    This walking the ball up the court and then starting the Globetrotter weave is wearing pretty thin in my book.



  • @nuleafjhawk didn’t we score 19 pts on transition baskets last game?



  • @nuleafjhawk

    Not joking about the all trey theory.

    It contradicts all orthodoxy and common sense about diversified modes of attack, but…

    Numbers don’t lie.

    The same force that drove the unthinkable extinction of the mid range game should eventually drive the extinction of the short range game.

    And it should happen with, or without a rim protector, and with or without an inside scoring presence.

    And if a coach wants diversification he should only engage in it playing outside in, i.e., by long rebounds being converted to quick passes only to a wide open footer parked at the iron.

    Bottom line, devise an offense with offensive action designed solely to create open looks beyond the trey stripe. Run the clock as long as it takes to get that open trey look and take it.

    Do it in a 71 possession game.

    Guard hard.

    Defend to hold down their trey attempts to less than yours.

    Regardless what size your inside players are, if you shoot >30% you are in the game by definition, regardless of whether your bigs are tall or short.

    Shoot >35% and you win probably 90% of the time.

    Shoot > 38% and you win 99%.



  • @jaybate-1.0 You know I love threes … but it’s a 60-40 rule on threes. 40% is about as high as a team could shoot threes. You mention 38%. If you shoot 60% from two, you’ll be equal to 40% from three. KU has historically shot over 60% at shots near the rim, sometimes at 65%. “Near the rim” is key. Not ever two pointer, but just near the rim.

    This, I think, is why Self subscribes to the pound it inside theory.

    But of course, when you have team that can’t score at that rate inside. That is nearer to 50% at the rim, then you only have to shoot 34% from three.

    Thus the inescapable logic of shooting more threes with this KU team.

    @Crimsonorblue22 you responded to @nuleafjhawk as if the 19 points really mean something. Have you seen the prior 11 games? Here’s a very interesting insight from Landen Lucas, speaking about our secondary break:

    “Instead of having everything kind of mechanical and robotic — you go here and you go here — it’s kind of go wherever, just make sure you get the ball side to side as soon as we get downcourt,”

    This was apparently implemented before the Kent St. game.

    But the real news is how “mechanical and robotic” Self demanded the secondary break to be in the first place, before that. Self is realizing we need to “manufacture” offense – his words. So he’s loosening the reigns on his secondary break thinking this can help.

    The micromanagement of the secondary break is astounding to me. These guys aren’t children.

    I just try to analyze the logic. If not being “mechanical and robotic” in the secondary break provides more offense, why not do it all the time? Good grief.

    Self places an artificial ceiling on his offense, by demanding such a strict adherence to system. It’s a “one in the hand vs. two in the bush” philosophy. It’s extremely conservative.

    I love this quote from an NBA scout about Andrew Wiggins, because it provides such an insight into the truth:

    “In general, interesting kid. In fairness to him he played in a very restricted system at Kansas. All interchangeable parts with designated spots, a lot of structure. When he got the ball, there wasn’t a lot of room to create.”

    The comment from Lucas is even more insight into what we already know.



  • @HighEliteMajor yes I have seen all games. If you read the article from dec30 it says

    “That’s what we were doing, trying to get it inside and we did a good job of moving fast. That was the first game we tried it. I think it can only get better with time. I think it’s something this team can be good at. When we are playing uptempo, everybody gets a little bit more juiced,” Lucas added.



  • @Crimsonorblue22 Don’t get your hopes up. Let me ask you, why should that be the “first game (they) tried it?” Why script and make the secondary break so “mechanical and robotic” in the first place? This is one of those deals where I think I could hear any purported explanation and I wouldn’t buy it, but I’m all ears.

    Self doesn’t even permit the team to try to break off of made baskets. They stand around waiting for the designated guy the throw the ball in most of the time.



  • @HighEliteMajor

    But almost no one ever shoots better than 40-45% FGs against a really tough defensive team. And this is why shooting 71 treys a game would guaranty a good defensive team of being in almost every game, and of winning most of those.

    Now if a team can score 60% inside, then you cannot beat them regardless.

    But that’s the same as saying if a team shoots 45% from trey you cannot beat them either.



  • @HighEliteMajor I won’t waste my breath. We use to run the KU secondary break, spent a lot of time on it and we did really well!! Some kids need structure, some don’t get it in their hs programs. Bill is well - respected, IMO more than coaches that don’t have structure, and have really tall kids. Throw out the ball. I guess the structure didn’t hurt Wigs to much. I remember him saying he was surprised how much he needed to learn.



  • @jaybate-1.0 a question, do you know how many 3’s ISU shot, at least the last 3 years?



  • @Crimsonorblue22

    Here it is, Why do you ask?

    2014-15 10 games 347-703 FGAs .494 97-281 3PTAs .345

    2013-14 36 games 1062-2239 FGAs .474 301-840 3PTAs .358

    2012-13 35 games 962-2111 FGAs .456 346-924 3PTAs .374

    2011-12 34 games 864-1977 FGAs .437 193-630 3PTAs .306

    Inference: ISU is also taking waaaaaay too few treys.

    They would probably be unbeatable if they just took all treys.



  • @jaybate-1.0 you were saying we need to take a bunch of 3’s per game, forgot how many, but crazy amount. I didn’t think to many teams took more than ISU, just wondered. Today they were 0-16, till the end and made 1. Wow! 1-17!



  • @Crimsonorblue22

    Please recognize I am thinking outside the box here.

    Self is a great coach and his way works 82-84% of the time the last ten years. I love him. I am not criticizing him in particular here.

    All coaches should look into what I am talking about.

    If I recall correctly, when the three point shot was first created there were several teams early, especially mid majors that experimented with shooting a large percentage of treys. The problem they ran into was that the mid majors then did not have good enough athletes shooting the treys to keep from being shut down on the outside by elite and major program players.

    What I am arguing now is that if one is an elite major program, like KU, or even just a rising major, like ISU, one’s perimeter athletes are so good that they will be able to get their three point shots off with considerable accuracy even against the best defensive teams from the best programs. KU has incredible length outside on the wings. If an offense were schemed to create open treys, our guys would get 71 open looks by running the stuff for up to 30 seconds and pulling the trigger when finally open. 71 treys at 34-35% would probably feasible. And the fouls of shooters would be three FTAs, not 2.

    I am pretty convinced the reason coaches do not try this is because they know it would marginalize the big man scoring and that would mean that big men would not be willing to come to their program. And the big men are the bread and butter of the NBA and of the OAD program.

    So: even though what I am advocating should work mathematically, established coaches that are winning big with OAD bigs just are not going to try it. They have worked too hard to get to where they are being funneled OAD bigs by Big Shoe.

    But when you cannot get three good bigs that are cornerstones of challenging for a ring, along with a good PG and one every game MUA on the wing, then you might as well try what I am saying that season until you can get your next OAD/TAD big rotation valved to you by Big Shoe.

    At least that is my hypothesis. 🙂



  • @Crimsonorblue22

    If ISU were to build a team around three point shooting, instead of just building a team that shoots a lot more treys than the competition, 1-17 would almost never happen for two reasons.

    First, by shooting 71 treys per game, you would almost always offset any slump that occurred during a game. The worst thing coaches do is to give up shooting treys when the team is missing them. If you have dominant bigs inside, it is a workable tactic to stop shooting treys in a slump and go inside. But if you have these dominant bigs, you didn’t really need to shoot treys in the first place. But if you don’t have dominant bigs, and you stop shooting treys, then you really have the worst of all possible worlds. Shooting 71 treys per game would result in the same smoothing out of shooting percentage over the course of a single game that shooting 50-70 2pt FGAs does. THIS IS THE KEY: YOU CAN HAVE A SLUMP SHOOTING EITHER 2PTAS OR 3PTAS. IN EITHER CASE, THE GREATER THE N THE GREATER THE GREATER THE PROBABILITY THAT YOU WILL SHOOT NEARER TO YOUR AVERAGE. As N rises the effect of anomalous runs is reduced.

    ISU shot a very scary 1-17. But do you understand how much more improbable it is for a team that averages 35% from trey to shoot the equivalent of 1-17 on 71 shots? On 71 shots it would be highly improbable that they would go 5-71.

    There is no escaping the remote possibility of going 5-71 from trey, just as there is no escaping the remote possibilty of going 5-71 from 2pt land.

    But statistically what happens is this;

    2 pt shooting teams shoot to their averages, as n rises.

    3pt shooting teams shoot to their averages as n rises.

    I would rather scheme an offense to get open look 3s with weak big men than scheme an offense to get open look 2s with small big men that can’t shoot a high percentage.

    And I would especially prefer this if I were playing an opponent that:

    a.) shoots the usual mix of 75% 2ptas, and 25% 3ptas; and

    b.) I can strip and turnover so that he has 5-10 few shooting attempts than my all 3pt shooting team.

    Again, the percentages favor me, unless an opponent can really shut down my trey shooting, in which case I’m beat regardless, because my bigs can’t score on their bigs.



  • @jaybate-1.0 you are definitely thinking outside the box! Did you see the ISU game? After missing that many early, they were to afraid to shoot anymore. Zero confidence.



  • @Crimsonorblue22

    The thing about thinking outside the box is that the logic is either valid, or it is not. If the logic is valid, then it pays to go outside the box. Not if not. The logic on this seems valid. So: its time to go outside the box, not just think outside it.

    All great shooters have to shoot their way out of slumps. They cannot “not shoot” their ways out of slumps. Shooting is a mechanical process locked up in a stochastic process. There is no escaping it. Shooters can develop mechanical problems that they have to fix to start making them again. But here is the key thing: the stochastic process, or envelope in which shooting occurs, would dictate slumps even if there nothing wrong mechanically. But mechanical problems often do contribute to the slumps. So do psychological issues growing out of either the random slump, or the mechanically driven slump. But sooner or later, the mechanical flaw gets corrected and the shooter still has to shoot his way out of a slump. The most frustrating slump of all is one where a mechancial flaw slump is embedded in a longer stochastic run slump, because the player has to take time to fix the mechanical flaw, and then gets no positive feedback for the fix, because he is still missing shots do to random error, too. It is a bitch and can wreck guys for big chunks of seasons, instead of just a week or so. I always thought Brady Morningstar’s mother of all slumps his last season was a mechanical slump embedded in a longer stochastic slump that then turned into a psychological crisis that finally still had to be shot out of.

    See, there is no way to fix a stochastic run slump. It is what it is. Same for an individual, or for a team. The only way out is forward and shooting and missing as you go until the random error in your shooting has been expended.

    If you are a coach and see a guy shooting the ball incorrectly, then you’ve got a mechanical slump. You pull him, correct him, and if he can’t correct it ASAP in the game then you pull him till he can work it out in practice.

    But if you see a guy mechanically sound that is missing shots, you’ve got a guy in a stochastic runs slump and the best thing to do is keep feeding him the ball as long as the spread in the score permits. Keep feeding the guy and keep him shooting no matter how awful it looks, because getting him enough misses is the only way to get him out of it.

    With an entire team schemed to shoot mostly 3s, you would have the same risk of mechanical and stochastic runs slumps, as you would if you schemed it to shoot mostly 2s.

    The key to shooting slumps is to teach your players to expect them, the same way Self teaches players to play like shizz 1/3 of the time, average 1/3 of the time, and great 1/3 of the time.

    Just as they have to learn to win ugly, they have to learn how shoot ugly.

    They have to understand that they ARE going to go 1-17 sometimes, not often, and then go 9 for the next 17. It is how it is.



  • @jaybate-1.0 did you see ISU game? They started having success taking it inside.



  • @Crimsonorblue22

    No, but that is just the outside in effect. It works the same as the inside out effect. Even if you don’t score much inside, when you pound it inside, it will loosen the defense up and get you some open looks outside, when you finally go outside. But it is not efficient to waste your first phase of your game, whether you are playing inside out, or outside in. Efficiency depends on scoring both phases of your game.

    This is why I prefer going outside and staying out there where every shot counts three. And when you shoot enough shots you shoot to your average and a 35% trey average is hard to beat if you guard and strip allow them 5-10 fewer shooting attempts.



  • @jaybate-1.0 I’d love to see a team shoot 71 3’s. Changing the subject-do you live in ks where it’s really crappy out tonight? Just wondered.



  • @Crimsonorblue22

    No, but its cold where I am, too.



  • @jaybate-1.0

    Come on man, give us some hint! I maintain you’re near DC…



  • @VailHawk if you were a good special agent, you should figure that out. Is it a secret?



  • @Crimsonorblue22

    I think cold is a good hint. 🙂



  • 3:25 p.m. today, KU locker room. Coach Self - “Uh uh, listen up, I’ve been reading KU Buckets and we’re going to make some changes to are strategy, Wayne, you are going to sit out this game, Svi, you’ll uh, uh, take his place. I want you to shoot at least 25 shots. Also, no more screens, to many fouls by the one’s setting them, Perry, you’ve lost it so Jamari is going to play your spot. We need to lose this game so that Brannen can find his shot, he just needs to forget about any leash and just keep shooting, don’t worry about playing defense. Also we are going to implement a new offense designed by Jaybate and HEM. I only want us to shoot three’s and play outside in. Finally, tell your OAD’s friends that they will no longer be recruited. Uh, uh, now go get em.”



  • @Crimsonorblue22 It IS cold where I live, too. It got all the way down to 63 degrees last night.



  • @KUSTEVE where are you? Enjoying that cement pond?



  • @Crimsonorblue22 Near Tampa, Fl. It will be 83 today. I’m sorry.



  • @KUSTEVE got room for me?? Enjoy!!



  • @Crimsonorblue22 Absolutely…bring your swim suit…



  • @jaybate 1.0 Are you Vivek Ranadive? If so, is the team in Sacramento or playing on the road (like Minneapolis)?



  • @EdwordL

    No. But his is a fun name.


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