It's just a stand alone tidbit I found funny. The rest is good too:
Passions have cooled, tears have dried, and the wounds have scabbed over. Time to pick at them while wondering whether Jose was the patron saint of faceplants.
-- First of all, props to Russell Robinson and Darnell Jackson. Other than Russell's first half against SIU, they played some of their best basketball of the season in the Regional. Unfortunately, their best isn't much -- some defense, a couple of hustle plays, and not doing anything stupid. While that looked pretty good compared to the mind numbing performances turned in by Meadowlark, Pele, and Roberto Duranivich, its not something you can saddle up and ride to the Final Four.
-- Roosting Chickens, Part I. The major complaint in the first semester was that the team had nothing that even vaguely resembled a half court offense. That deficiency was masked in the second semester as we worked the high screen/roll against vastly inferior teams athletically. It was all Fool's Gold. When we finally ran up against a couple of teams that could trap and defend the screen/roll, we had nothing. Zero. Zippy. Nada. MEMO TO: Mr. Bill. Telling the lads to just put their heads down and barrel into the lane is not an offense.
-- Staying with that theme, SI has a very good article this week on the teams in the Final Four and the 3 point shot. The thesis is that they are among the best teams at defending the three and, more importantly, denying the 3. Certainly we saw that against UCLA. Howland's defensive scheme allows for no help by the wings on dribble penetration. They stay with the shooters and the on ball defender tries to force his man towards the post defenders. Works pretty well. After getting every 3 we wanted in the subregional and shooting nearly 60%, we got nothing over two games from beyond the arc in San Jose.
-- While we're at, can we put to rest this nonsense about the team missing 19 lay-ups? We didn't miss 19 lay-ups. What we missed were a whole bunch of very difficult, highly contested shots that just happened to be from close range. UCLA did a very good job of funneling drives towards their bigs.
-- Roosting Chickens, Part II. The other major complaint about Self, and this goes back three years, is his utter inability to ever make a decision about who is going to play in the post and to develop anything that resembles a half court, low post threat. We desperately needed that in San Jose and it was nowhere to be found. Instead, it was just a continuation of the crazy quilt pattern, "Hey, maybe this guy will work tonight." Honestly, I'm surprised we didn't see Klienmann.
-- Can someone explain this? Brandon Rush came to school supposedly having great talent, but having never really been coached. Julian Wright was supposedly the heady, well schooled, fundamentally sound basketball player. The reality is that Brandon Rush was the most fundamentally sound (yes, past tense, he's gone) player we've seen in a long time. It looked like he came to ku after playing four years for Morgan Wootten. Wright, meanwhile, has played is if the only coaching he ever received was during summer AAU ball when he took time off from the And1 Tour.
-- Roosting Chickens, Part III. Enough with all this talk about defense. As I've said all year long, defense is a relative concept. It does you no good to hold the other team to 60 points if offensively you can't get past 56.
-- MEMO FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF CONSISTENCY: You cannot say the season was a great success while simultaneously complaining that the weak Big 12 failed to adequately prepare us for the tournament. It's either one or the other. It's no great success to go 33-4, 14-2 against crap competition. Would we have been better prepared for UCLA if we played Maryland and UVA on the road rather than Nebraska and Missouri? Of course. Would we have been better prepared by a home and home with Duke, rather than KSU? Certainly. Would playing UT, A&M and OSU on the road rather than at AFH have toughened us up? No doubt. Of course, we wouldn't have won 33 games and 14 games in the conference playing a schedule like that. We would have lost many more and The Flock would not be indulging the myth of the successful season.
-- Better luck next year, Kenpom.
-- Finally, for those of you who never get out of Lawrence or gauge the perceptions of the typical college basketball fan, I've checked with my bellwethers. These aren't Ibiot trolls or Hillbilly IC'ers. They're just guys who are pretty big fans of college basketball. They have their own favorites but have no axe to grind with ku. To a man, their opinions are the same -- ku had great talent but was as poorly coached a team as they had seen all year. The national view of Self is "great recruiter, can't coach a lick." Fair or unfair, you should know that is the reality of people's perceptions.
