TGIF: Ames, Here Comes the Jayhawks!
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All right you bunch of CornStalkers, don’t stalk our Bill anymore. It won’t stop the beat down.
KU is coming to Ames to recall the Mayor!
They have two trifectates. We have four trifectate lock down wardens. Hilton is about to be in lock down.
This prediction is to cheer up @HighEliteMajor : KU attempts 23 treys! I know. The reality is 15, but @HighEliteMajor and I are in this for the long haul!
Super props to Bill Self for putting an 82% winning record on a big man recruiting game that has appeared to be stacked against him since 2008, when Memphis was taken down–first on the sacred wood, then off it, as the Cal/WWW regime did a motion play. Self remains a basketball genius. Is he a target the wrong way types have to keep trying to marginalize, or will they declare him Jeremiah Johnson and finally let him alone? “Some say he is dead. Some say he never will be.”
Luv to Ollie and UCONN for turning the academics around, if the classes are legit and the players do the book work. Books, babes (er, women) and basketball…nothing better!
RIP Bob Boyd–great story about the best runner up in history; cool pic of Boyd, Houghland and Noller; proof you can do a lot of good out of the spotlight. http://www.nola.com/lsu/index.ssf/2015/01/bob_boyd_had_a_lasting_impact.html
High Noon at the NCAA–imagine the town after Gary Cooper cleans it up and leaves disillusioned with townsfolk. Imagine the town is slowly taken over by a bunch of opportunistic pimps and hustlers that ally with a cynical school marm that inherited a small gold mining fortune to put lackeys in as mayors and sheriffs. Imagine some tough railroad companies from outside muscle in and take it over from the fallen school marm and the pimps and hustlers. Imagine its one newspaper editor was forced out and replaced by a lackey in league with a black hat running the local roulette wheel. Imagine the lackey mayor of the town ordered to strip away the old laws that are disobeyed and told to replace them with autonomy. GULP! But who knows, sometimes even privateers and rum and slave traders rise to the call of more representative process. See our American Revolution. I just watched “The Patriot” again. What an amazing country we can be when the stakes are rightly understood!!! http://m.espn.go.com/wireless/story?storyId=12176157
Rock Chalk!
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Does anybody know the game day schedule? Don’t want to miss it.
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8pm CST
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The game day events, thanks.
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Oh, god, dear, don’t watch those. Your brain will atrophy.
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Unless of course Drake switches sides.
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@jaybate-1.0 I have to!
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Repeat after me: I am woman hear me roar!
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@jaybate-1.0 won’t the KU players be on? Or coach?
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I don’t quite frequent the boards enough to know the state of the K-Union regarding playing time philosophy, but a couple questions come to mind as we get through the meat and potato’s of conference season.
Is big Cliff not ready yet for playing time? He’s putting up pretty good per minute numbers right (stats a la JNewell), but still only getting 20 mpg. Is he not passing the eye test yet? Will we see him break into 30mpg anytime soon- perhaps lingering back problems?
Along a similar line, how much of Perry’s funk is just a funk? Self is very high on him and he still gets his 30mpg good or bad. Does Self limit his playing time ever until we see super aggressive Perry? Also, as an aside, I’m not as big of a fan of describing Perry’s play as lacking energy. Although I do recall a few games when he did look a little sluggish, that’s not quite my beef with his play when he’s slumping. Super aggressive Perry may be better at rebounding, but also seems to throw up a lot of spin move shots that don’t really… have a shot. Would love me some more intuitive/high IQ Perry for the rest of conference ball! Obviously, energy is still a big part of playing well, I’m just making the point that I don’t want it to translate to poor shot selection for the sake of being aggressive.
Self was very high on Wayne before the year started, touting him as one of the best in practice, and Wayne is playing very well. Is the ceiling a lot higher for him? We haven’t seen too many break out games from him this year and we are 16 games into the season. Does he have potential to go off for 30+ points? I think he does! Just haven’t seen it yet though.
This will be a tough game at ISU, at the start of a tough 3 game stretch. Hoping we can go 2 for 3 and end up 5-1 or better. RC.
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When defenses go all out to stop a bread and butter type of offense, such as screening for Forte for the entire possession time, it wears out the person guarding that man. How Mason gets the points he does on offense after how well he plays defense is amazing. Selden plays incredible defense, but his offense suffers a bit because of it. The comment about Cliff’s minutes comes down to Lucas knowing the system on defense better, right now, than Cliff does. Many of the Dunk fans just want Cliff in for offense, but as of right now, Lucas still has a greater Red Shirt knowledge. Mistakes outweigh any pluses on offense in the Self Book of Playing Time.
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Wayne is the big mystery to me. Not Perry. Perry’s issue is pretty clear. He got thrown into the toughening box to try to break him out of his tendency to let blue meanies able to shut down his scoring in his usual ways send him into a conscience stricken funk, after which he does the disappear-o. Perry is likely to bounce out, unless he has cracked, or something, which hardly seems likely.
Wayne on the other hand is something of a black box.
I know he is being given some tough assignments on defense, but he has been an absolute nothing offensive player against very weak teams and middling teams that had no challenging defender for him to score on.
Wayne shows serious signs of loss of pop.
Loss of pop usually means a great athlete, like Wayne, can continue to defend well.
But loss of pop usually hugely limits his scoring, because he has to find a new way to score.
It appears to me that Self has thought that Wayne is having some trouble overcoming the psychological affects of his knee injury in terms of aerial ballet stuff.
But this has gone on so long that it seems more likely that he really has lost his pop and so is retooling his offense and it is slow going trying to do such a thing during a basketball season.
One more possibility is that Wayne was rounding into playing shape and playng psychology around the time he had his one really good offensive performance and then shortly after that he may have reinjured himself somehow. Last year he had a sharp drop off that lasted the whole season and after the season Self revealed he had played through on a knee injury. That is always possible again.
But to me Wayne is a black box, and the above are only wild speculations.
I just don’t know what to think about him.
But if, as Self says, he can come around this season, KU is going to have a non linear synergetic effect from it, and get a whole lot better.
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Yes, but they never say anything meaningful in those game day interviews. Its after the games and day after press conferences where they some times throw us some real bones.
And you have to understand. I am spoiled by the sassy, brassy virtual reality of you and others here, so mainstream media stuff is just not authentic enough for me anymore.
But I don’t want to be a curmudgeon.
Enjoy the heck out of that stuff if you do.
Basketball is all about having fun.
Rock Chalk!
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@jaybate-1.0 if they do, I’ll let you know!
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Did you see Selden’s block? That kids can seriously elevate, no missing pop, IMHO, just his timing seems to be off in dunks.
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@Crimsonorblue22 : I can’t be certain but I know when KU has been on Game Day ESPN didn’t have the other team out there. ESPN wants to pump up the crowd. Ushering out the Jayhawks and they may riot…
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You know I didn’t really take a good look at his dunk. I was focusing on some other players. I hope you are right, and trust your eye, but early in the season there was no mistaking he was having a lot of trouble. I have kept seeing him only being able to take off on the run and that is always a sign of lost pop. You know, they jump waaaaaay long on a lot of momentum but you never seem them exploding straight up. I never see him taking on much air on his J on an open look, unless he is coming off several steps of motion; that’s another sign of lost pop. Finally, when he is going for a rebound, from a no-step jump he is never getting much lift. And that’s another sign of lost pop.
But the thing is I am referring mostly to earlier in the season, when I was watching him closely and saw so little pop early that I quit watching for his further recovery. But I will keep an eye on his springs versus ISU and expect to see what you see. If I don’t, I will let you know.
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@Kip_McSmithers I haven’t watched one for awhile, you are so right!!
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@jaybate-1.0 I thought he looked the slowest I had ever seen him last game. It looked like he was laboring to catch up the whole game, and prodding along. I think he needs rest. We’re playing him too much, and not playing Greene and Svi enough. The message we send when we can’t find one single minute for a kid who has worked so hard …smh. Maybe he will remember his other 3 point shooters in this upcoming game…
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Interesting point about the fatigue.
I did not notice that, but I find I am missed quite a bit the last game.
Did he seem slow on both ends, or just on the offensive end.
It could be that he was conserving on offense to be sure he had energy credits to burn on defense.
Just a thought.
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@jaybate-1.0 He was hardly moving on offense, and when he did, he looked like he was in slow motion.
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Well, that sounds like Self told him to conserve himself on offense, because Self felt that Greene and Svi were too long and slow footed to stay with a tireless super gnat like Forte.
And while Self is playing Graham a lot, he probably figures that Graham could go out at any moment with a re-injured turf toe. So: Self probably ordered Selden to conserve on offense regardless, and figured Graham could goose it a little on offense when in.
So: we probably shouldn’t judge to much about Wayne’s offense based on the OSU game.
I would expect that Greene and Svi will probably play quite a bit against ISU’s long perimeter trey ballers. Better match up as they say. And that will allow Self to tell Wayne to play hard on both ends because he can expect some substitutions.
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I saw that as well and attributed it to the energy spent on D, will have to watch tomorrow a bit closer. There are times he seems to have his pop, he releases higher on his jump shot and seems to a bit more in rhythm when he does. I have not been able to tell what the difference is from pop time to non-pop time.
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Let’s hope we get off to a good start in Ames, so the crowd doesn’t take us out of the game.
Ours is still a young team, when it comes to entering asylums like Hilton.
Kelly has never faced anything like this before.
Neither has Cliff.
Frank and Wayne and Perry and Jam Tray are the only guys that have really had to deal with this sort of thing before, so I expect them to ring up the most PT.
It is different sitting on the bench and watching it, like Greene and Lucas did last season, but I expect them to be called on.
Svi may be held out of this one.
It could really get hairy, if ISU’s two trey ballers sink three or four early; that’s when Self will have some tough decisions about whether to go outside to match trey for trey, or slow it down and create shots for Perry inside.
