Post game thoughts on Baylor Game.
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@nuleafjhawk said:
I had not, although briefly I had flashbacks of my 3rd grade YMCA team…
PHOF
Channeling your inner HCBS with the YMCA team.
And Selden only woke up for the final two minutes. It’s not like he put together an entire half, dreamer.
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@HighEliteMajor The first half, we looked like we had never seen a zone defense in our life. It wasn’t just poor shooting - it was poor strategy.
I love your posts. Your repeated comments over an argument from weeks back are beneath you, and what you bring to these boards. I would hope you would rare back and fire, no matter who you piss off- if they’re pissed off, that’s their problem. We need great minds to break everything down …sometimes that analysis is not going to be milk and honey. That’s the curse you carry for knowing bb a lot more than most of us, myself included. So, please carry on.
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I think we take the W and move on. Road wins are a premium in this league and getting 1 will bode well for the others we will play. Can we play this poorly on offense and expect to win the other 8, probably not. Our Defense was very good last night and kept us in the game.
We missed 20 shots first half, always a recipe for a halftime deficit. We made what 62% 2nd half after adjustments. A lot of easier rim shots which we can credit Self for finally getting to the weakness in their zone. They packed their zone in and dared us to shoot 3’s. We did that poorly for most of the game.
The ref’s put their whistles away and let em play a really physical game. In 2 possessions in the first half that kid Medford should have fouled out. Arm bars, wallet checks, holds galore. Every Charge call (both ways) was a terrible call. Traylor got one the guy flopped. Traylor stepped in on Motley’s huge dunk. Frank got called for going up for a layup and getting undercutted. The only one they got right was Chery forearming Mason.
Saturday we get the easiest game of the season followed by the Wussies from Oklahoma St. Hopefully a 3-0 start going into Ames next week.
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I will start by saying that I did not think we could win a game like this. Offensively, none of our best weapons showed up. No Oubre (offensively, anyway. I will get to his D in a minute). No Selden until right when we had to have him. No Perry. Frank didn’t even have a very good game, honestly. Alexander didn’t do much.
I did not think we could win a game when all of that happened, especially on the road and especially against a ranked opponent. I need to re-evaluate what I thought about this team’s toughness.
This is now two consecutive games where Oubre’s shot has been absent, which is worrisome, but where he has contributed in very large and very tangible ways. Tied for the team lead in rebounds with 5 (by the way, why is the rebound leader only grabbing 5 boards!) and led the team with 4 steals, besides making the two biggest defensive plays of the night. Kelly is showing more and more each game why he is the best player on this team and why he will be a top 10 pick in the draft this summer. He plays hard, so even when his offense isn’t happening, he’s making plays.
Cliff Alexander is 6-8, 240 pounds and learned the game on the courts of the Chicago Public League. How a guy like that gets only 1 rebound in 20 minutes of action in a game in which neither team shot 50% from the field is beyond me. If someone else has an idea of how this happens, and more importantly, how this can be prevented from ever happening again, please let me know.
I thought maybe the refs were hurting us last night, but I have come down on the side of them being just bad overall. Right at the beginning of the second half Jamari got an and one on a bang bang call (likely correct because the defenders heal appeared to be in the restricted area). However, in the first half, the refs waved off a dunk to call a charge on a Baylor player on a similar play (although Jamari appeared to be above the restricted area on that play). However, if someone jumps over you and dunks in your grill you cannot draw a charge. Obviously you weren’t in that great of a defensive position if someone dunked all over your head.
The game was physical, but the fouls were pretty even (17 on KU, 14 on Baylor). It wasn’t a game I would say was well officiated, but it wasn’t skewed one way or the other. Ultimately we survived a tough game on the road in conference. That’s an enormous outcome for us.
Texas Tech is by far the weakest team in the Big 12. We should handle them (and hopefully see our offense get right) before we have to deal with Oklahoma State and Iowa State next week.
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@HighEliteMajor I don’t know how anyone can refute your #5 pace comment, or most certainly your #6 dissection of a capable zone offense. Simply amazing how you put this in wordage that laymen can understand. This is exactly the type of textbook copy I spent hours & hours reading 20-25 years ago when the Y came calling. There were a few vcr instructional videos available, but most of my material came straight from the library or other coaches. My only guess is that these young kids can’t pick up on these zone breakdowns because they don’t have enough time to practice against it & the scout team cannot effectively produce a competent defense to attack. Bill is most likely just playing the hand he’s got & probably trying to prioritize on the fly. Deduct conditioning time from practice & gym time is at a premium, not to mention tutoring and class attendance. Maybe there aren’t enough hours in the day for these guys; after all they’re really just kids. But I agree 100% this is on the coaches & that’s why they get the big bucks. Don’t know about most but it was all about the fun/challenge for a small town guy like me. Again HEM, great post & breakdown.
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I might also add that to effectively use the back screens for the lob vs a zone, it is much easier to accomplish with a second screener like Roy did so often & Bill with better ball handling teams. That premise takes the wing out of the backcourt and without two good ball handlers on the floor at once, is not an option Bill is considering now. Face it Wayne is not a good ball handler, neither is BG. Kelly is improving, but he’s not a Brandon Rush yet either. I think going forward when Graham returns this attack mode will change. Anyway I would certainly hope so. Of course there are many ways to skin the critter. JMO
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@KUSTEVE Thanks … I will be mindful of your advice there. Much appreciated. Apologies to @JayHawkFanToo. I won’t prod.
@globaljaybird - Appreciated, as well – I do wonder on the practice time thing and what the focus is many times. We did not have quick turnaround (Sat - Wed). I think Self is holding out hope that Ellis can be effective inside, or Cliff. We did not adjust preemptively to account for the interior ineffectiveness. I’m not sure why Self would think Ellis could score inside against that zone, when he struggles in man with weak side help. I will say that we did shoot a number of threes that did not fall. My critique of the zone offense considers that. If we would have hit three more threes in the first half, we have a nice half time lead. Add one more in the second half and, theoretically, we win comfortably. My comment on the zone O would be the same even if we had made three or four more threes. We wasted much of the shot clock looking for entry passes. Did we even get any post entry passes that resulted in a kick out for an open three? I’m going to watch the game again tonight. I’m curious about that.
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@HighEliteMajor Maybe we need to give Baylor’s guys a little credit for playing a more effective zone than we’ve seen in the past also. Quite often many games our defense has been weak when they’ve had more accomplished inside scoring, plus they missed several bunnies too, Gathers may be the conf reb leader but he’s not a Jefferson or Austin either. Simply amazing to me we got a W with Chery going for 25 like he did. Seemed every time we went under a screen he made us pay. Also am really happy Heslip is no longer there to nail our rear anymore. Chery was more than enough to wear me out by himself. He sure had me talking to myself plenty.
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Cumbertatch is the Olivier of this generation.
Probably better.
Olivier was probably better on stage.
Cumberbatch is far better in front of a camera.
Great photo and reference.
Having said that, here is a but…
But remember. KU winning by a small margin in no way refutes KENPOM’s quantitative portrayal of KU.
QA is never about being right, or wrong, any more than a radio telescope is about producing a life like image of Alpha Centauri. QA is about capturing and analyzing the quantities counted in numbers produced by a facet of a phenomena to understand it from that perspective. Nothing more. But nothing less. Events are multi-faceted. Events have quantities, so quantity is a facet of events to study.
To the point, it is better in QA to be wrong by a narrow error factor, at least in predictive estimations and simulations, than to be right with a huge error factor because all QA is, whether it admits so or not, arriving at confidence intervals; this is something a lot of folks–though not odds makers–struggle with.
And not just odds makers and Quants and scientists grasp this, but artists, too. Any really good artist understands that the rightness of a composition of an image rests on a constellation of approximately equilibrated and juxtaposed forms, colors, textures, symbols and signs in a dangling mobile-like balance of internal references in the image itself and amongst the image and the artist’s (and hopefully the viewers) perceptions of reality beyond the image.
Your image of Cumberbatch as Turing with the masonry matrix of the past behind him on the Z-axis of time back of which he lacks recollection juxtaposed against his invented computer cypher of the moment that is a formal externalization of his mind revealing both its structure and connectivity projected beside him on the X-Y axis expresses visually Turing’s complicated immediate past and increasingly formalized present and immediate future.
This is the form language of cinema that great directors speak without expecting audiences to necessarily grasp it, any more than great Italian Renaissance painters expected artistically untrained persons of their time to necessarily “read” the compositions of their paintings. It is quite enough for even the greatest artist just to have some ordinary folk enjoy the heck out of what he has done. He does not need them to get all his techniques he uses to create the effects he creates that dazzle and delight. Nevethe less, the image you chose has a sense of aesthetic formal visual rightness that orders and makes it compelling to an audience to one degree or another, with and without their understanding of his methods.
Further, a computer in this image is fundamentally a device for processing quantities of events in quantities of time, which was one of Turing’s great insights. The smaller the increments of time made possible by the evolution of time keeping (from the large increments of sun dials, to the shrinking increments of pendulum clocks, to coiled sprung and geared chronographs, to atomic clocks, to quantum clocks) the greater the richness and complexity of simulations become possible. If a computer is tasked with a computation that takes a millionth of a second, but your clock only works in seconds, then you can only coordinate with real time with intervals of seconds. But split a second into nano seconds, or Graham number seconds, or smaller, and you can orchestrate a lot more computations with real time events with a phenomenally fast computer. With a quantum computer breaking seconds into near incomprehensible near simultaneities of time increments, a driverless car with a feed back loop of sufficient complexity and speed becomes utterly feasible to achieve. So might simulating the computational speed and richness of a human mind, though we run into the initial limits of not being interpret the reliability of outcomes of what we are enabling to happen at such high speeds in such short times.
Breaking codes and pass words as Turing set out to do with brute force serial processing is nothing more than combining great quantities of combinations of symbols matched against known sequences of symbolic meaning (pattern recognition) in tiny quantities of time. It seems obvious now, but it took a Turing to make the connections between what IS inside the mind with what is possible to build outside the mind to augment it to a rather specialized, rote task. The mechanical type writer and the mechanical calculator, telegraphy and radio, mathematical modeling, concepts of statistics, basic chemical, mechanical and electrical engineering, as well as higher mathematics and Base 1 were indispensible foundations that had to be in place for Turing to externalize the conception of human deciphering of meanings from the brain across the the skull wall barrier to the machine manifest beside Cumberbatch, as Turing.
It was one of many extraordinary moments of human thought externalizing across that skull wall boundary into something unprecedented and enduring, rather than atomizing in ephemerality. We would see and know something similar in an image of Isaac Newton holding a book of the calculus standing beside a canon, Watt standing beside a steam engine in a coal mine. Ford standing besides a Model T on a wagon road, or Crick and Watson standing beside a model of a DNA helix, r John von Neuman beside a formalized strategic game on a black board. We could think: when this shizz gets outside the skull it can go viral and change the world and ourselves in startling, only partially predicatable ways. Or we could be visual artists and make images with the tools of aesthetic form languages and graphic punctuation. And both actions would reveal insights about facets of the phenomenon.
You overlaying tongue-in-cheek your white, perhaps New Century School Book (I would enjoy such an allusion to the pedantic) font exclamation, as satiric and ironic reference to what I wrote about statistics in regard to JNew and KENPOM’s QA of KU and the B12 both destroys (or redirects as is the vogue expression these days) the equilibrated composition of the director’s image and in the destruction (redirection) creates an new meaning and new, or re-equilibrated composition, as good satire does in all the contexts and art forms that satire may be applied in.
I suspect I am mastering the obvious for you here, but I am taking the opportunity to use another one of your marvelous image/message combinations as an excuse to share with others a basic insight about QA and perhaps help them appreciate its potential contribution to our understanding of what is happening.
QA is about being close for the right reasons.
KENPOM’s prediction was close and so one should look more closely at his profile of reasons to discover controllable elements of it that might enable KU to escape its determinism. All systems can be open ended, or closed, depending to some degree whether we choose to reinforce them, or break out of them, as Turing chose to break out/externalize a game changer (the computer) across the skull wall boundary and so move beyond his analog, masonry past and agonizingly into a digital, vacuum-tubed and electron-flow connected Base 1 present. And the director brilliantly puts the audience in a perspective that feels like one is looking back at Turing who is in our past.
Capice?
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Of course. You took the words .right out of my mouth.
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@Kip_McSmithers post game self said they worked on it, before unlv. Think they have that on the other site
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Howling.
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I could have my Self colored glasses on, but I believe his offense flows from his players.
Self has said in the past how he used to be a big “set play guy” but he has changed his offense ever since '06 to be a more free flowing system. All his plays have multiple options based on what the defense does. If we look back to the '08, 12, and 13 seasons, we see those teams burned zones. The players were older and they had a feel for the offense of Self.
Like most offenses, the offense starts with a pass to the wing off a pick from a big man. From that, the point guard cuts and rotates to the other wing, and the other guard or big man pops out to the top of the key. It is all about ball reversal to create angles for the hogs below the basket. But there is not a specific pass that leads to a bucket, rather players flowing on the wing and big men establishing position.
The part that has me pulling my hair out was we did not do what we did before league play, take early shots if they are open. They kept doing past years and thought that enough ball reversals would equal good position for the hoss down low. Instead of attacking with a shot or drive off the second and third pass, we just kept passing the ball around the perimeter, hoping a magical leprechaun would come down for a backside lob.
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@justanotherfan TT only lost by 9 to Texas. Good, young kids.
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@MoonwalkMafia everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I liked Tharpe too. Who called him a scrub? Fact is he had good moments and bad moments. Good that you brought up some of his better games. However, he also had 15 games last year where he shot less than 30% from the field including 3 zero percent games. There is nothing false about my statement. In fact, my claim is that other players improving can be at someone’s expense. Tharpe was a good player that struggled last year.I also remember Frankamp shooting us back into the Stanford game. Not bad for a Freshman.
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I think a stat no one is talking about this game is turnovers. We only had 8! That is outstanding even in a slow pace game like last night. No player had more than two from what I saw. So while they may not have been as aggressive as they should have been, at least the boys protected. And I wasn’t counting but pretty sure they won the deflection battle even if they didn’t all turn into fast break points.
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@benshawks08 Very good point. And I do believe we had zero turnovers in the second half.
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@jaybate-1.0 said:
QA is about being close for the right reasons.
KENPOM’s prediction was close and so one should look more closely at his profile of reasons to discover controllable elements of it that might enable KU to escape its determinism. All systems can be open ended, or closed, depending to some degree whether we choose to reinforce them, or break out of them, as Turing chose to break out/externalize a game changer (the computer) across the skull wall boundary and so move beyond his analog, masonry past and agonizingly into a digital, vacuum-tubed and electron-flow connected Base 1 present. And the director brilliantly puts the audience in a perspective that feels like one is looking back at Turing who is in our past.
Well said.
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Traylor played like the man we thought he could be! Frank mason is my MVP of this team- he’s always doing something good. Gonna be huge if we get Devonte back. I think a loss in this game might have elicited probably unreasonable doom and gloom for this young team, or maybe just for the fan base. Good thing we won!
We don’t normally talk about a players confidence- you guys really think Perry confidence could be hurting? Some of these guys are getting pretty seasoned you would hope.
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@HighEliteMajor The Keep Away comment struck me as funny because that thought occurred to me while I was watching. I’m not enough of an X and O guy to comment about how to attack the zone. I have never thought that Self’s strength was running a precise offense like Belien or even ol’ Roy. It was good to see Traylor operate effectively in that gap in the 2nd half. Baylor adjusted, which then appeared to open up more opportunities on the outside…thus our scoring chances down the stretch.
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@BucknellJayhawk3 I don’t think there is any question that Perry loses confidence at times out there. You could see if with his hands on his head posture as he headed to the sideline. It seems to affect his open looks also…he hesitates and then misses.
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Overall, though we won a road game at a place where some of the other contenders may not. Selden turning it on down the stretch after not showing much was almost hard to believe. I would point out, though, that he drove the lane a couple of times in the first half and was just short and had one roll off…if those 2 shots go in he might not have appeared to have such a bad first 35 mins. Sometimes it’s a fine line…
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@BeddieKU23 Cool post! Great points, all of them. What the heck is wrong with Perry Ellis!?!? Dude just has not had a good game in like half the season so far. I see him drop his head on missed shots and missed D & missed boards? Maybe he is realizing he isnt NBA material? I have no idea but its hard to watch. He is a good player, a good one. Very good. But he isnt playing like it. Its like he is psyching himself out before the game starts, anticipating that he’ll fuck up somewhere and just lets that keep him from playing to his talent level.
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@benshawks08 Benshaw, great point. In a nutshell, they had one more turnover and that led to a KU win.
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the other was assists with 19. I believe was a season high and had been a season long struggle for this team. We lost basically every other stat that matters but still got the W. It was a tuff game, both defenses gave it their all.
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@Lulufulu I think Bill’s toughening box is breaking him down. His body language has changed so much the last 4-5 games.
The locker room ideology among this team, as conveyed and promoted by Self, has Perry at the top of the leadership hierarchy. The reality is that he is not a leader and he isn’t THE natural leader of this team. Dealing with this and that he isn’t living up to his own expectations along with Self’s beatdowns in practice is getting to him, imo.
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@BeddieKU23 I sensed urgency in their crisp and deliberate passing for the first time this year, so that was nice to see. But I think the season high in assists has more to do with the zone defense they were playing against than anything else.
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@justanotherfan Im not saying we are going to beat Okie state but they just dont seem like they will be as big an upset threat as they were the last two years with Mr Flopper king Smart.
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Of course, Smurf-on-Steroids Part Deux, AKA Phil Forte, will probably go off for 30+ points…
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@JayHawkFanToo If Mason guards him? No way.
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It is a KU tradition, we always allow a player from the other team to have a career day…:(
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That kid for some reason seems to have it out for us every time we play them. It’s not like we didn’t recruit him and Smart. He choose to go to Oklahoma St so I’ve been perplexed everytime we play them that Forte gets pass half court and chucks shots at the rim that go in. This year he has added more to his game than just 3 point shooting so he’s not as easy to guard. Hopefully we stop him from making everything again
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@JayHawkFanToo but… We win!
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Of course we win…we are KU!!!
