Here’s something for Bill Self to consider following KU Jayhawks’ loss to Baylor
It’s great to be proven right, and goodness knows that Kansas coach Bill Self has had more than his fair share of great calls during his hall of fame career.
He’s not perfect, though — no one is — so even he needs to be wary of falling victim to a natural human pitfall following Kansas’ 77-69 loss at Baylor on Monday night.
Confirmation bias is something we must all guard against when trying to seek optimal decisions. In short, this partiality is searching for information that supports our own previously held beliefs.
And frankly, it’s the only logical explanation I can think of when it comes to Self’s current commitment to have David McCormack be KU’s primary option offensively.
In poker, we’d call this “pot committed.” Self appears to have extra skin in the game here after he expected McCormack to be KU’s best player in the preseason.
This, simply, has not panned out.
There’s a difference between scoring and efficiency. While McCormack has put up scoring numbers recently — and clearly had his best overall game last Tuesday against Oklahoma State — his overall offensive production just isn’t that great compared to KU’s other options.
Following Monday’s loss to Baylor, McCormack has a season offensive rating of 100.7 and a usage rate of 29.0 at KenPom. In layman’s terms ... he’s been a below-average offensive option, while compounding that issue by taking on an unnecessarily huge offensive load.
Here’s a chart — courtesy of BartTorvik.com — that shows every KU individual season since 2007-08, among players who’ve played at least half of the Jayhawks’ minutes in a season. Those further up have better efficiency, while those toward the right have taken on a greater offensive role.
Thomas Robinson is McCormack’s closest comparison, and those two aren’t really close efficiency-wise, with Robinson doing a better job of creating close shots and also getting to the free throw line during his junior season in 2011-12.
Playing through McCormack has an opportunity cost too. Force-feeding the big man not only has moved KU away from an early-season five-guard epiphany that saved the Jayhawks in a few close games, but it’s seemed to crater the production of Jalen Wilson, who looked like a surefire All-Big 12 first-teamer before this stylistic change contributed to a sapping of his aggressiveness and confidence.
All this isn’t to say that McCormack shouldn’t have a role on this year’s KU team; that’s not true at all. But a quick glance to the advanced stats should be sounding alarms that even national writers are beginning to clamor about: KU should not be running its offense through a big man who has made 43% of his twos against D-I competition while not drawing an overwhelming number of fouls.
Some of the past quotes seem relevant now. Two weeks before the season, Self said of McCormack: “I think David has been our best performer up to this point more so than anybody in our gym. ... I’m not predicting anything crazy. I am saying from what we’ve seen so far he’ll be a big source of our offensive output based on how I see us playing through our bigs as much as we like to.”
And here’s Self two weeks into the season after McCormack started slow: “He’s going to be fine, folks. He’s going to be fine. It’s just been a little bit different than the way we anticipated starting based on how practice has gone, because he scored at will during practice. Like I said all along he’s been our best player consistently since Aug. 1 up until the games started. I am very confident we are going to get out of him exactly what we thought we would at some point in time, hopefully sooner rather than later.”
To give Self the benefit of the doubt ... some of this could simply be trying to pump a guy up. Maybe this was a coach speaking to a player through the media while trying to keep his spirits lifted.
Taken at face value, though, it sounds a bit like a coach attempting to speak a self-fulfilling prophecy into existence.
There seems to be a better path forward. KU needs its big man to fit its other four players, not the other way around. It needs better defense from that 5-spot too, with Baylor and Oklahoma State both using simple ball screens to put KU’s defense in conflict when McCormack was unable to stick with offensive players in space.
This gameplan, in other words, has had time to work, but it just isn’t.
Perhaps Self still will be proven right. Maybe McCormack will improve and turn into the player the coach has believed in all along.
The danger, though, becomes if that doesn’t happen.
Because it wouldn’t be McCormack sinking KU’s chances at a higher ceiling then; instead, it would be Self.
This story was originally published January 19, 2021 at 2:28 AM with the headline "Here’s something for Bill Self to consider following KU Jayhawks’ loss to Baylor."
