Get More FGAs, Get More Strips, Get a Few More Reebs, Shoot More Treys, Add Huggie, and Win
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You don’t have to be able to shoot well, just shoot more.
WVU was nearly +20 on FGAs.
WVU shot about twice as many 3ptas.
WVU had 7 more strips.
3>2.
KU only shot 11 treys.
This is like a rifle platoon going into a fire fight with grenade launchers and mortars and NOT using them, and not calling in artillery, just relying on M-16s and effort.
It almost worked.
But why do it at all?
P.S.: I had a petit mal seizure today and picked KU to win +10 based on our superior trey balling. Without putting too fine a point on it, that prediction sucked!
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@jaybate-1.0 I think you were right on with your 10+ prediction, it’s not your fault this team turns to jelly for no apparent reason. I will give them this, they were consistent. Consistently bad. Consistently stupid. Consistently lazy.
But I mean that in the nicest possible way.
Maybe the crowd got to them. All 467 of them.
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PHOF
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Did we get out-coached?
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We got outrebounded and just flat out scrapped. Very disappointing. Out coached is tough. I think coaches out coach each other frequently back and forth throughout games. Tough to really say who got the better of who in that dept tonight
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If Perry makes the layup, we’re all happy happy joy joy?
This loss is really annoying
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@VailHawk the layup miss doesnt bother me near as badly as him moving completely away from the basket and the ball on statens drive. Just an awful defensive effort. The truth. Ellis carried us for most of the second half. But kinda dropped us about 5 seconds early. Tough to be too disappointed in him overall when you put the whole game into perspective. But… We will need our best players to make plays for us at the end of tight games in order to win number 11 and or have any success in the dance
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I’m not sure how to answer that.
Neither coach was acting particularly rationally.
Huggie didn’t use his press much of the second half that would have made beating them very tough.
Self didn’t use his OAD center the entire second half, which made it kind of tough to win.
One way to look at is that Self coached a pretty good game because without his OAD center playing and effectively no rebounding he only lost at the buzzer.
Another way to look at it is if Self had only had them shoot 20 treys instead of 11, they would certainly have won.
Huge Bear seemed intentionally to refuse to let the refs win the game for him.
At the same time, when Self tried to ride the refs to try to win the game, Huggie road the refs to keep it exactly even on the fouls.
It was like Huggie was determined to beat Self mano a mano.
Huge called off the press, when Self benched Cliff, as if to say, well, I refuse to beat you because you sit your big man. I will handicap my own team so that we are even again.
Then both coaches coached this hog wallow second half of basketball, the likes of which I have never witnessed before, and then at the very end tried to beat each other.
But didn’t.
Finally it came down to Staten making a play ground play and KU making a play ground cherry pick and Perry missing a bunny.
I think Huggie out-coached Self, because Huggie won without OAD/TADs.
But Self didn’t play one of his OADs, and he didn’t let his own team shoot threes that would have won it–apparently some kind of outrage at improperly his players were playing.
At the same time, if your team can’t rebound and it can’t score inside, why NOT shoot treys?
Frankly, this game eludes me explaining it conclusively.
All I know for probably sure is that Self appeared almost from the first minute of the game furious with his players performances and really spent more time fuming about it than coaching, and appeared to do so quite consciously.
And then he had Huggins, who is one of the few coaches that may be as smart, or smarter than Self, toying with him all game, while Self intermittently stopped fuming and made counter moves with Huggie, just to show him he could.
It wasn’t really like Self got out-coached. It was more like he was so mad he decided not to coach some of the time and contemplate whether he wanted to be a coach at all with this team.
Damnedest thing I ever saw.
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As usual, you’re on to something here. What makes Self mad? Quick 3’s. Brannen and Svi both take quick open 3’s and miss. Bench.
Cliff, silly foul by not keeping his feet. Benched rest of game.
We looked scared. Were we scared of Self? Mason is the only one who didn’t look scared.
What blue blood gets scared in a half filled gym in west virginia?
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@VailHawk Cliff is lost out there, never in the right spot. You did see BG handling the ball and not blocking his man out?
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I don’t know. If the guys were afraid of something, would Brannen and Svi have even taken those shots? If Cliff were afraid, would he have just been sitting there calmly in his warm up the entire second half?
I am not sure feared, or scared is it.
What I saw was guys that seemed to have gone a little past their breaking point from the stresses and strains of a long season and 2 in 3 days no longer really with the will to go on down this strange path of playing that has won 20 games and put them in first place, but that they just couldn’t quite leave it all on the floor for tonight. One of the posters commented insightfully about Perry carrying us much of the second half, but then at the end finally just seemingly not being able to make his exhausted body do it just one more time and stay infront of some player at what seemed a crucial moment. And he just couldnt’ ask his body to any more and finish that cherry pick, even after the herculean effort of breaking free to receive the desperation pass. Jamari Traylor just walked around the court for much of the game as if he were one of Merrell’s Marauders that just hasn’t got anything left to give.
Maybe what the fear and scared-ness you noticed was what happens when a fighting unit finally has given all it has to give at a point in a campaign and they are too good of soldiers in to desperate a situation to stop fighting, but they just don’t have anything left to fight with,
I keep remembering how fun it is to do things you are better than the other guy at in basketball, but how incredibly hard and unfun it is to have play guys that are bigger and/or better than you all the time. For a while you take it as a challenge, but then over time the struggle, which you seem to learn how to do, begins to wear you down, and, finally, some time, in some situation, you realize you just can’t do it again, you can’t play at a disadvantage again, you just aren’t resilient enough to respond to peril and turn tactics on the spur of the moment into winning strategy, and you finally just get the milliion mile stare and keep going through what you know by rote, but not with the level of intensity it would require to win.
Maybe these jarhead jayhawks have just been in the jungle too long, been in one too many fire fights recently, and found themselves in hostile surroundings where the bigger guys were just leaning on them too much and the refs were giving the other guys just too many calls, and the unit just finally cracked.
Maybe they need a short break, or the acknowledgement of their leader that maybe they did break, and maybe he pushed them to hard, but after a short break, he is going to stand them back up, put helmets back on their heads, and rifles back on their shoulders and they are going back into action, because this IS what its all about. Pushing through breaking. Going further than they or anyone else thinks they can go. They don’t have more talent than other teams. Sooner or later they were going to have break and go beyond breaking, if they are to be something special. Bad as this feels, as demoralized as they became, this night in mountains of Morgantown, is just another mountain range to cross on the way to yet another battle, on the way to a Myitkyina no one thinks they can reach, a place they no longer no how they can reach. Now they are beyond the known. It came sooner than anyone hoped. But everyone knew in the backs of their minds this moment was coming for the team with no back to the basket game, with no no enforcers, with no ability to score inside, with nothing but courage, will and a devotion to each other to survive and keep on going to their own kind of Myitkyina–a place they have never been to, never seen, never made the trek to before, a place they only have a map to and a leader telling them the way to, and driving them all harder than they have ever been driven before.
Eggs are going to get broken on this trek.
They got broken tonight.
The Jarhead Jayhawks broke, as an effective fighting force for a time, and yet they never quit. To the last second Perry was breaking a way and trying with whatever remained in him to steal a win in Morgantown.
Frankly, maybe this team needed to know what it feels like to break.
Maybe that was the only way for them to take the next step.
It was brutal to watch. Almost too painful.
It is never pretty watching units break.
But now that they HAVE broken, they now know what to expect the next time they get near that point.
And so the long march goes on.
Saturday, TCU. Monday, Bramlage.
Then Texas, West Virginia again, and Oklahoma.
The mission is Myitkyina.
If you want to go there, there is no short cut.
Its not whether the unit breaks.
Its whether you put it back together and keep going.
Anyone can win a title with rim protectors and rebounders and back to the basket game.
Our mission is to get to Myitkyina without those things.
Those other titles were child’s play.
This is the greatest challenge a Bill Self team has ever faced.
Period.
Win a title without the pieces you need.
Win a title turning tactics into strategy again and again as you go.
This team is special for coming as far as it has.
It doesn’t have the pieces.
All it has is the mission.
And young men willing to sacrifice to go there.
And someone to lead them.
And many to cheer them on.
Put the helmets back on.
We’re going to Myitkyina.
And we haven’t seen the most harrowing parts yet.
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Man O Man, after TCU this battle for Title #11 is going to rev into white-hot action! No hiding behind the trees with small caliber ammo. The hoops nation is primed to see just what Bill Self and his current bevy of nontraditional Jayhawk troops are made of. Yee-Haw!
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@jaybate-1.0 Perhaps some time we will all get tired of beating this horse that Self has declared dead. WHY, WHY, WHY, coach? Your team shoots a better percentage of threes than twos… 3>2, yes indeed. I think we are seeing ample proof that this team is not going to grow substantially or get better from close in before the end of the season.
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@lincase At least when he’s sitting on his couch at home watching the second games of the NCAA’s, he’ll have the satisfaction of knowing he did it his way.
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@nuleafjhawk PHOF
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Self is saving Cliff for next year.
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@wissoxfan83
Perhaps he needs saving?
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“As usual, you’re on to something here. What makes Self mad? Quick 3’s. Brannen and Svi both take quick open 3’s and miss. Bench.”
This was a game about poise. Self came to Morgantown to teach the guys about poise. His idea was to go into a mobtown gym, and execute a game plan. Many parts of the plan eventually started to work. I am for this team shooting the 3… but I understand what Self wanted in this game. He didn’t mind the 3, but he wanted it to come as a quality 3. The key to our offense was to not play sped up. No quick force on the 3. Anytime Brannen is shooting the long ball and it isn’t a simple catch-and-shoot, it is a forced shot. Sped up. Not what Self wanted. Self had it right. Run true half court offense, extend the defense and attack the middle. Where he screwed up was he used Mari as the surrogate instead of playing another guard. We could have fouled out WVUs post players quickly if he had.
“Cliff, silly foul by not keeping his feet. Benched rest of game.”
Cliff did look out of sorts in this game. I’m not sure what the right answer is here. We either give him more time to gain experience or we play our best hand in this game, and that was with playing small. Mari was used as a key player in the offense. Post player penetrating and feeding. Should have been a guard.
“We looked scared. Were we scared of Self? Mason is the only one who didn’t look scared.”
We were scared. Refer to my “Boys of Summer”…
“What blue blood gets scared in a half filled gym in west virginia?”"
A blue blood with mostly boys representing it. That’s who…
“Win a title without the pieces you need.”
We have plenty of talent to win. We have as many (or more) McDs AAs than anyone in our conference. We miss only one piece: manhood. We remain one of the youngest teams in the country, and the piece we lack is the ability to not turn submissive in games. You can review all of our losses this year and it all boils down to this. Our guys going soft.
This isn’t about building bigger muscles. We have Wayne Selden, and he often plays the softest ball on the team. It’s about the mind and projection. It’s about accepting manhood. It’s about committing to the responsibilities involved with being one and being held accountable. No team of 5 men would get manhandled like these guys did on the offensive glass. I don’t care if it was a team of 6’ and under.
We almost escaped with a win. The more I think about it, the more I’m glad we lost. There is no lesson in winning. We would have glossed over our biggest problem… the one real piece this team is missing… manhood!
We need to stop focusing on the wrong stuff. We don’t have the big shot blocker in the post or the big rebounder. UCONN didn’t have one either, and it didn’t stop them from a national championship against a huge team.
There is only one factor with this team moving forward… it’s not Cliff, or Wayne… or any one player. It’s a team effort, and this team needs to step up into manhood as a group. I just don’t know how that happens quickly without something big happening. But winning a game we deserved to lose in Morgantown sure isn’t part of the formula for success moving forward.
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Cannot agree with you on reducing this to manhood, but I can in part.
Cobbins and Nash are better than Ellis and Traylor, or Ellis and Lucas, or Ellis and Alexander (so far as he has shown).
Barnes’ bigs at Texas are better than ours even though Rick can’t get them to play well as a team.
Baylor’s bigs are as goods as ours, but they are nearly completely uncoached.
Oklahoma’s bigs appear better to me than ours.
Self has been beating teams by trey shooting into leads and then basically just hugging the paint until the other team catches up, then shooting more treys to get a lead, etc.
So far as I can recall, we have not been able to beat a single good team with our bigs generating the leads.
I have agreed with you most of the season that softness and outright lack of manhood was involved in our weak play inside, I do think that we have improved in this regard significantly the last month or so.
I really do think Perry had a break through when he ran into that guy on Baylor in the second half and finally got a full tilt bell ringing and realized it wasn’t so bad.
Perry played like he liked contact this game against WVU. He’s not an enforcer, or anything, which is what you need against any Huggins team, but he was mixing it up pretty much all game. To me Perry is the key to this team taking the next step. Selden lacks the hops to become a great offender now. And he is not at the point of temperament as a soph to really become a hard case, apparently.
But Perry is at the right moment to become a guy that likes to mix it up and so leads his team to at a least like to mix it up.
No enforcers on the team this season.
None.
But a team full of jarhead jayhawks will follow a guy like Perry into mixing it up; that far they will go.
And I do believe there truly is a potentially angry man inside Perry still.
It may never come out, but his will to competitive greatness and fury, though still coming and going, is coming more often than going at least at this point.
Remember, just as it was Perry kind of fading against the Staten at the end, it was ALSO Perry that broke out of no where when there seemed no hope at all and almost saved victory from defeats jaws on the cherry pick.
There are two Perrys.
The longer the season goes on, the more we see the one desperately trying to win the game, and the less we see the one fading from Staten.
We have to believe.
The team has to believe.
They have to keep fighting through the beatings Self is exposing their weaknesses to and getting better.
There is no other way now. And as wise old Self knew from the Kentucky game on, there never was another way.
Softness must become hardness.
Whatever the cost, because we aren’t all that talented inside, and we were soft.
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@nuleafjhawk I know what you are thinking
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@Crimsonorblue22 Sorry - chronologically I’m 56. In terms of maturity - sometimes 16.
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@nuleafjhawk I thought the same thing, who didn’t?
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@jaybate-1.0 Oh my god. I had to wait until today afternoon to even wrap my head around that loss last night. KU could have won that game. Even getting out played for most of the game AND getting royally screwed by the refs, they could have won it at the last second. Perry gets the ball, drives to the hoop and tries a finger roll instead of going up hard for a dunk attempt and a possible drawn foul? Geeeeeez. Its just weak. Weak!
Ah well, when the conference started, I really didnt think we would win this game. But as the season progressed, I really started to think they could win. It just didnt work out in our favor at all.
One last thing. PAY BACK IS A BITCH!!
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@jaybate-1.0 A couple times, I thought both coaches would pick up Techs. The lack of trey shooting by KU was baffling. I mean, I dont think I saw any plays run for Greene to get open on the perimeter. Did he even attempt a 3 last night? I didnt look at the box score.
Also, Im finding it harder and harder to believe that Cliff will declare for the draft. I mean anything is possible right? Ala Josh Selby. But no, Cliff needs to come back, he is not NBA ready. Either that or Self is holding him back.
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@jaybate-1.0 Allow me to vent - your words on Perry are too kind, and I can’t hold it anymore. Call it his inner being or whatever it is. This is just a confirmation - I’ve never really thought he was as good as … Yes, a shining star in Wichita, a great student & darn good kid, but don’t see as a NBA. There’s no fire or hunger in his belly. Not counting on him to take us to the F4. And I agree our bigs lack the talent (no more inside scoring) that require to beat the arses of Kensucky. We will need more than his conversion from soft/reluctance/afraid of making mistakes to I want it gotta have it will die fighting for it stuff it. It is very FRUSTRATING to watch him play! I won’t be surprised if there are some personal issues with Perry vs Cliff for Self. Would Perry shut down if Self focuses too much on Cliff? I don’t mind losing but the way he loses is beyond my comprehension. I’d rather have a 3 star who goes at it like a bull dog and leaves his heart out on the court! Like Mason! Your comments stopped the fumes from coming out of my ears that started last night. Appreciate the insights!
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Maybe we had to lose so we would play with a sense of purpose again. Maybe we didn’t want to be that number 8 ranking/seed because we would rather face Kensucky in the Final Four, instead of the number 2 seed in the Tucky bracket, and facing off in the Elite 8. Maybe Huggie promised to share his “Beat KU” cash with his players, and it really motivated them. Maybe Wayne actually saw his shadow, so 6 more weeks of up and down play ( he makes Tyshawn look consistent …roll that one around the noodle a time or two). Maybe the team needs to come up with some pick and rolls, high screens, etc, and get our 3 point shooters some room outside. Ooops…in the immortal words of Major Payne:
Don’t push the MAYBE, baby.
