This is the best visual guide to Bill Self's offense that I've ever seen
At the highest levels of basketball, the game happens very fast. Slowing the game down in order to illustrate the level of the game’s detail it what made writers like Zach Lowe and Luke Winn superstars—they’re both the best in class when it comes to taking a series of complex, fast gameplay and making that information accessible to casual fans as well as die-hard strategy types.
This analysis is more difficult than it looks. For instance, while reading Zach’s essential NBA roundups for ESPN.com, it’s not uncommon that I’ll have to watch his clips 2-3 times to fully process what’s going on in a given play or game situation. Some of the plays he highlights show the play’s movements well, but the execution isn’t 100%. And while Bill Self has molded a whole persona around casually describing incredibly complex ball screen motions like he’s giving you directions to the 23rd Street Brewery, none of this on-court strategy is that basic, to say the least. It might not surprise you to hear that a couple of simple-yet-ingenius insights steer everything that KU does, but a highlight video I recently came across really drives that point home.
My brother just had a kid. (Our whole family is in love, obviously). As he ticks down the clock on his paternity leave, he sent me this video last night, a scouting vid compiled and edited by Hoop Vision. When Clark sends an endorsement of an analytics-based hoops video, I know I’m about to dive into something that’s all-killer, no-filler. And this video delivered that, and beyond, thanks to its efficient design as well as its curation of demonstrative plays.
In Hoop Vision’s walk-through of Bill Self’s go-to sets, the scouts thread together the major themes of KU’s offensive strategy. We all know Bill Self is a defensive guru, but this video presents how directly his ideology on defense trickles over to offense. In both the four-man and in Self’s post-offense, he’s targeting the last help defender—and if that defender doesn’t read the play from the first pass on, he’s likely to get burned no matter the duration of a given play. By making an away-from-the-ball defender the most important defender in a given set, Self is able to manipulate matchups constantly and create easy buckets if the defense isn’t perfect.
The video covers several years, a period in which Self’s offensive philosophy has evolved to incorporate three-point jump shots more than ever. So it’s fascinating to watch Self tweak the sets to account for changes in gameplay style, all while adhering to principles he’s built offenses around since he came to Kansas. While the “Self Perspective” video series has been revealing, Self is (probably deliberately) underselling his offense’s nuance, especially when it comes to ball-screening action. With the context that the video provides, the recent success of KU guards and wings in the NBA (Oubre Jr, Graham, Svi) is less surprising, in hindsight; those players have been drilled on perfectly-timed ball-screens since college, and that has accelerated their growth as playmakers and cutters both on-ball and away from it.
The full version of their scouting break down—which also features key insights into teams like Kentucky and Duke—and is available on their website for $19.99. I will definitely end up copping at some point, as I have certainly spent $19.99 in much less rewarding ways.