BAD BALL STRIKES AGAIN!!
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I felt like we accidentally fell out of bad ball a couple times when our offense started clicking…but then got back into it!
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That’s pretty telling (self’s quote)
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Good win (are there any bad ones?). I thought we played tough defense, but man, Baylor missed some good looks! Our offense at times seemed to work, but the dumb turnovers were killing me. Good to see Wayne produce. Although he was a butcher at the line. Perry limped off, but they said it was his quad…not his knee. I hoped that Brannen would get hot after his first make in a while…but he promptly missed his next one…we need him to regain his touch, for sure.
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Now you are getting it!
The players are the same way. They still slip and thinking open for an uncontested two oer three is good. It’s not. Only driving into their space and forcing them to either foul you, or let you shoot, or both, is BAD BALL! Everything we do has to disrupt their momentum and stymie their runs,
Baylor was .445 PPP the first half. That bought us the cushion to shrink their impact space and make them foul the second half, even though they made a flurry of treys.
BAD BALL is BEAUTIFUL DISRUPTION OF FLOW!
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@wrwlumpy love that!
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Let’s assume we keep winning w bad ball…and ride bad ball all the way to the F4…how will an opposing coach scheme against bad ball?
Assuming we don’t beat ourself, can anyone other than UK beat us? Could Stumpy?
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@jaybate-1.0 So we saw a bit of what our boys can do against Cali & 10 OADs? This Bad Ball is the anti-thesis of before mid-life crisis Self era? Is it okay to believe this team will get NC? Say yes! I want/need to believe!!!
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@HawksWin I think there was a lil great ball mixed in this time!!! D was great!
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@HawksWin Sorry…but you gotta sink or swim on your own, trying to assess how far this squad might go. That said, if we can dislodge ways and means to muddy up games in even more ugly fashion, we might just limp to the Championship Game. Truly, a very unusual Jayhawk season. Bill Self must be sleeping in a pair of tall muck boots, sloshing through vivid nightmares.
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Nothing about winning ring is probable for anyone in a 64 team tourney.
But if we were to slog to the Final Four, and if Perry were to be 90% by then, and we shoot our 10 treys well, we are the ideal candidate to beat UK, even without Cliff.
It takes a stretch 4 to pull one of their footers from the rim.
Once pulled from the rim, we attack the other footer from all other positions and win it on the foul line.
Why cliff would improve our chances so much is that he could outrun their footers end to end 15-20 minutes.
It all comes down to can we guard their footers? That is Self’s forte. We could not guard them seven games, but we could disrupt their flow one game.
Nothing is written.
Nothing.
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And vivid possibilities.
If the opponents don’t figure out BAD BALL, the slog could end in Myitkyina and those most used to slogging hold a great edge over those that have never slogged.
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ISU tomorrow!
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@jaybate-1.0 My sentiments exactly! I dont know where the ISU game tomorrow stands on the march to Myitkyina but man its gonna be tough to the Nth degree. Tough to the 10th power. KU is tougher and has a deeper bench than ISU. I honestly though the final game would be OU Vs BU. I was wrong. I hope I am wrong in my rather nervous thoughts about tomorrows game too.
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With UVA and Duke losing today, if we beat ISU tomorrow, do we have a case for 1 Seed?
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@VailHawk Seriously, IF KU actually makes it that far and plays UK, either in the elite 8, or FF or Championship game. We play BAD BALL and win the disruption stats like Jaybate says. KU is tougher than UK now. They can take major hits and keep on going. KU can beat UK
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@Shanghai_RCJH Doubtful. KU has too many losses on the season. That would be interesting though, very interesting indeed.
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@Lulufulu I will be happy if we are not in UK, Villanova, and Wisconsin side of brackets. These teams are trending up.
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@Shanghai_RCJH agreed. I very much dislike UK and Nova.
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@Lulufulu u r getting depressin!
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@Lulufulu u think we have a chance to beat uk but thought we would lose to Baylor?
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@Shanghai_RCJH maybe???
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@Crimsonorblue22 If Zona, Nova, Gonzaga somehow lose tomorrow. It would be very interesting.
If their games are earlier than ours and if they all win, and if I am the Coach, I may take it easy tomorrow as we have secured 2 Seed.
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Looks like we have mastered Bad Ball, to me it is 5 good “Bad Ball” games in a row. I don’t consider the loss in OU was playing lousy Bad Ball, we played the game without Ellis, Greene and Seldon played injured. And, we almost come away with a W. 5 in a row to me is consistency. That is Identity. And, it is the type of Team that past KU Teams did not like to see in the Dance. RCJH!
Note: Cliff is no longer a factor.
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BAD BALL OR UGLY BALL???
I understand the concept and what Coach Self has done, what I am not sure is if we should call it BAD BALL. To me BAD BALL loses games where UGLY BALL wins games…yes, it wins games the ugly way, butt ugly way, Aunt Esther ugly way (for you Sanford and Son fans)… but wins games all the same. No question that KU is winning the ugly way, but if it would be playing BAD BALL it would be losing the games and not winning them.
So my question is shouldn’t we call it UGLY BALL rather than BAD BALL?..it sure sounds more appropriate.
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@JayHawkFanToo I see @jaybate-1.0 's icon below and a kb next to it so I presume he is preparing to tell you the difference between his “bad ball” and your “ugly ball.”
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I sure understand your POV.
I just started calling it Bad Ball as a little retro allusion to years back when calling something bad was to call it good.
the last month or so I was reading how everyone was feeling kind of down about how ugly we were winning, and I got to feeling Self and our guys were not getting the respect they deserved for what I thought/think is a remarkably impressive innovation beyond winning a few games ugly with grind ball. Rightly or wrongly, I began to see a lot of method to Self’s madness and the more I studied it, after being completely confused by it, initially, the more I impressed I grew with the principle and the accomplishment.
And I watched Frank play and carry himself, and the guys and they all just seemed like guys that really were Bad in the good way back in my youth. And I loved the cock sure look and the determination and the whole getter done way the team was going about it–so Jarhead Jayhawk–that it just bubbled out one post.
These guys deserve a lot of respect for what they have accomplished.
These guys deserve WAAAAAAY better than ugly IMHO.
And I’m okay if people want to junk BAD BALL not good enough to.
If “BAD BALL” has called folks attention to how special this team and this coach are, even if only out of forcing them to try to decide whether they like or dislike the term, then I am quite happy for any and all to come up with something better and more fitting.
I don’t care if these guys get bounced the first round or not.
They have made me love them like I loved that 2012 runner up team and I doubted I would ever love another bunch of Jayhawks that much.
But these guys are BAD!!!
Anyway, probably an old guy is not the right guy to hang a moniker on them.
Maybe some of our students, or some of our young posters, have hung a better nickname on them.
Whatever, it came from my heart and from my desire for Coach Self and this team to be respected and loved for what they have done.
Rock Chalk!
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This is from Fox Sports:
"Bill Self was the first to admit that Kansas and Baylor set basketball back Friday night. In fact, the Jayhawks coach said the late Phog Allen and Henry Iba would have been rolling in their graves watching their ugly execution.
Then again, it was exactly what Self wanted to see.
’‘I think sometimes when it’s not very artistic, people say, ‘You didn’t play well,’’’ Self explained. '‘But if we played a pretty game with Baylor, they would have beat our butts.’"'
Coach Self also seems to think that it is indeed UGLY BALL…just sayin’
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Self is a genius, not only at basketball strategy, but in addressing the media, so as not to betray what he is trying to do in his basketball strategy.
Grant faced a similar problem late in the Civil War. He was among the most brilliant strategists and tacticians our country has produced. When finesse and maneuver could win the day in the West he proved himself brilliantly effective. When he came east, he read the vast difficulty of the situation correctly, and changed his approach profoundly and decisively yet consistently with his underlying principle.
He knew Sherman’s March from Chattanooga to Savannah would be criticized as viciousness of a high order in its effect on civilians. But he knew he needed to defeat not one but two foes: the Confederate Army and the Confederate people and he had to protect Lincoln from as much criticism as possible while doing it.
He let Sherman terrorize the Confederate people on the way to positioning his army to put Lee and the Confederate people between a great hammer and anvil. Grant then began relentless pursuit from both directions that all sides called heartless and blood thirsty and strategically misguided until Lee and the Confederacy collapsed.
Grant took all the “blame” for the winning strategy and tactics by not explaining he had told Lincoln this was what it would take to win the war decisively. He took the media’s wrath, so Lincoln did not have to, so Lincoln could survive and sustain him in his mission.
Self was keeping the mud off Allen and Iba, but both men would understand and applaud the brilliance of what Self is doing. Allen tried any and every kind of strategy and tactic he could think of over the years. Iba was the father of slowing it down and gumming it up, even as he was the father of the modern basketball offense. Great strategists and tacticians find ways to get it done. And it can take sensibility a long time to catch on to the brilliance and elegance of what many call ugly to begin with.
The awesome elegance of new ideas often overwhelms even its inventors, whose aesthetics are products of the time before their genius transformed possibility.
Oppenheimer said he thought of the eastern scripture “I am become death, destroyer of worlds,” when he witnessed the first test of the atomic bomb that hastened the end of one war and bounded the USSR, then deterred world wars to date.
The responsibility of a great leader in competition is to get the most out of what he has within the rules and put his side in the best position to win, then get it done.
My father did not take his boots off for ten days on Iwo Jima. He did not change his uniform for three weeks. He and his fellow Marines did not fight pretty. They had to change how they fought in real time. It was not pretty. But they got the most out of what they had, and despite all the human error, they got it done. My father never did view Iwo Jima, or war, or competition as an aesthetic contest. He never saw Iwo Jima as a beautifully composed photo of a flag raising and he constantly reminded me not to think of any competition that way.
Basketball is a game capable of beautiful moments.
But it is not a beauty contest. Naismith and the rules never awarded points for beauty. The points are awarded and withheld by getting the ball in the basket and keeping the other team from doing the same–within the rules.
The deep beauty of what Self and his team are doing lies within the elegant fit of their strategy and tactics with their abilities within the rules.
The more tightly the refs call the game, the better Self’s Bad Ball works.
Self’s Bad Ball does not, like thug ball, depend on breaking the rules and refs swallowing whistles. Quite the contrary. It uses KU’s athleticism to disrupt flow and then attack from all five positions. It challenges the refs to call the fouls and exploits both when they do, AND when they refuse to. Unlike thug ball, or even winning ugly, this is elegance and sophistication of a high order that is not yet smooth and flowing. This the elegance of chaos theory and emerging complexity. And these are the two most elegant scientific paradigmns to emerge the last half century.
Bad Ball is an experiment in altering fluid dynamics on wood.
There is as always the shock of the new.
Rock Chalk!
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KC Star. Interesting last paragraph.
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When we played Michigan in 2013 (I know I can’t believe I am bringing this up either) I knew that we could beat them (and did for 38 minutes) but I knew we could not beat them in a pretty way. They simply had more talent. More NBA players. What Self did pre-implosion was he muddied the waters. Played great D. Did not let their studs get the shots they wanted. Did not let them get into the lane where they wanted to be. The UNC game from 2012 may be a better example since we won and it took us to the Final 4. Or the OSU game the following round. We simply did not have the offensive fire power that either of those teams had but we played ugly and won ugly and I see this 2015 team doing the same thing starting next Thursday.
The reason I bring this up is I do see us moving onto the 2nd weekend and playing a 3-6 seed in the Sweet 16 / Elite 8 who has fire power. Taller guys. Better shooters. And I see Bill Self doing his best to make it a truly ugly affair. Maybe we will see a little Box and 1 that we did to Steph Curry or a little Triangle and 2 that we broke out against UNC and Harrison Barnes. Really looking forward to seeing what ugly tricks Bill has up his sleeve.
Great win last night. Hope we get a similar shooting night from ISU tonight from deep. RCJH!!!
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@Shanghai_RCJH Right? How do you win the best conference, outright, and the conference tournament and not be a 1 seed? I don’t think they’ll get it w the 7 losses, but I sure would like to hear their explanations
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@ZIG It is a really interesting situation. It may be the first time ever that the team from the best conference wins the regular and post seasons (if we win of course) and does not get a 1 seed. But I agree with the above posts that we have too many losses. The KSU one looks pretty bad.
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@joeloveshawks If Duke ends up still being a 1 seed, I’m going to be real interested in the logic. They didn’t win their conf nor their conf tournament. Yet, you know, they’ll be in the conversation for a 1. I don’t think the committee will put them there though, too difficult to justify.
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Self is contending with two new phenomena.
First, he has to deal with effects of accelerated learning. Teams AND players have to be developed in a season. Players are on learning overload. They lose focus more frequently and require more redirects and more intense redirects and more simple redirects to cut through their own analysis paralysis. “SOFT” and Self’s competitive fire are the tools he has found work best so far.
Second, the first problem is compounded by his having to resort to a new way of playing and so the players having to learn a new and counter intuitive, heady style of play.
This is the opposite of the pasteurized AAU junk Cal teaches and Self has had to resort to it to help compensate for the talent asymmetry from apparent talent stacking.
Note: maybe we need to start calling it SMART BALL and Cal’s AAU dribble drive DUMB BALL.
Anyway, learning to play a new way creates even more information overload.
Self is defaulting to the simplest, most intense instruction to keep from talking too much to his info overloaded players in the chaos of combat.
It makes so much command sense. The military creates its own highly specialized command jargon in battle to counter the chaotic noise of battlefield information.
It is not being mean, brutal, or belligerent. It is signal control to ensure a message gets through the information overload of combat.
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@Crimsonorblue22 I know! Im feeling a bit ahh, manic about our team.
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Duke’s body of work is going to have them with a #1 seed. Road wins at Wisconsin & Virginia carry a lot of weight. They had won 12 games in a row until that loss yesterday so while they didn’t win anything their body of work really keeps them up there. Plus its Duke, they get more coddling than any team not named UNC.
This year is very top heavy, I think if Nova wins out they get that last #1 seed. Wisconsin & Arizona are also just as good as anyone on a given day and could get that last seed with Tourney championships. Then you got Gonzaga which has a good team but the weakest resume of any so they are clearly a #2 seed.
Our 13-5 (possible 14-5) record against the Top 50 is insane and probably doesn’t get enough credit because we have those 7 losses and inconsistent play. It’s a catch 22 sometimes with scheduling, you get rewarded for playing good teams, but if you pile up the losses your reward only goes so far. I think the reward for our schedule is that it would have taken a collapse in the Quarterfinals against TCU to keep us off that #2 line.
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I’m gonna stick with that alliterative duplicitous moniker, “BAD BALL.” Right from its origin, I felt that jaybate had hit upon something very clever and appropriate to define what I was viewing. Bad bad bad. Man, this stuff is BAD!
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So does anyone have a preference with who the 1 seed is in our bracket?
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KU Should be the Number 1 seed.
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@jaybate-1.0 said:
I just started calling it Bad Ball as a little retro allusion
Ahh… and even going farther into that slang etymology, I seem to recall ‘bad’ being shortened from ‘badass’. (Also perhaps an offshoot of 'bad to the bone) Maybe ‘BA Ball’ (or BTB Ball)
Our team sure doesn’t get it done pretty this year, and they sure seemed softer earlier in the year, but wow, we’ve played with some major grittiness.
Loved yesterdays game, except for all those really bad passes. It was nice not to have the opposing team have a chance to beat us in the last couple of minutes for a change.
So glad to see Perry out there, Selden getting it done and BG breaking his slump. Would really enjoy seeing everything come together and blowing out IS today. Then again, maybe a blowout today would have them feeling cocky before the Dance, so it might be better to have another one similar to yesterdays game, strong but still gritty.
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@joeloveshawks You are absolutely right. The only way this team has a shot at a final four is to play bad ball and out tough the other team, just like in 2012.
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@jaybate-1.0 Why should they be?
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@DinarHawk Lunardi just put us back to Midwest Region where UK is the 1 Seed. I hope he is wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I am not scare of UK, but, would rather meet them at FF.
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History suggests that the committee does not penalize teams that have #1 seeds going into the conference tournaments for losing. They usually don’t remove them from the 1 line with a loss in the conf. tournament. Now, if someone is shaky on the 1 line, and I think that Duke could qualify, that might happen. I don’t think we have a shot at a #1…too many losses. Others (Wisconsin, Villanova have had better season, I think. But I don’t think there is any way they should move us off the 2 line even if we lose today. Like some have said…we won what most believe is the toughest conference.
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@Shanghai_RCJH Yeah, I would hate to have to play them to get to the final four.
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@DinarHawk Revenge should be sweeter when the stake is higher. RCJH!
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@jaybate-1.0 Are you saying Self’s criteria for recruiting OAD/TADs = athleticism + brain smarts? Lacking in bb fundamentals, some of these muscle boys need the brain power to learn Self’s Bad Ball that scraps & reprograms their muscle?
