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The way Bill Self sees college basketball from an offensive standpoint has changed. Kind of. 

The smorgasbord of wings on Self’s roster and the latest commitment of a small-ball power forward in K.J. Adams is revealing in that the Kansas coach has fully embraced his four-out, one-in offense — 4-game — and is all-in on versatile defensive lineups full of offensive playmakers. An even nuttier future for the Hall of Fame coach could even be in the works: 5-out offense. 

To appreciate the intricacies and evolution of Self’s playbook, last week I reached out to Gibson Pyper. In the Twitterverse, he’s an X’s and O’s expert. (If you appreciate play design, follow him @HalfCourtHoops.) His day job is as a high school coach, but few in this world spend more time diagramming basketball playbooks, and one of his latest conquests was putting together Self’s 2019-20 playbook with every action diagrammed and also building a video playbook with examples of the various actions. 

Pyper views Self as one of the top five offensive tacticians in the sport, and he has been studying his playbook back to the high-low days when his father, also a high school coach, adopted many of Self’s three-out, two-in motion concepts. In recent years, Pyper’s interest has revolved around Self building his 4-game and continuing to add wrinkles that highlight the strengths of his players. 

The conversation eventually delved into the 2020-21 season. KU’s main concern is how to replace Udoka Azubuike, who fit perfectly in Self’s schemes on both ends of the floor. While Self embraced smaller lineups and made 4-game his primary offense the last few years, the principles have mostly remained the same. Creating angles and scoring opportunities for a post player is still a major focus, and featuring a center who can feast on those opportunities is important. 

“I think it’s the No. 1 thing,” Pyper says. “They put so much pressure on the defense with that post pin and that post-corner throw; it just opens up everything else by default even if they don’t get a post touch. It’s going to collapse and force the weakside help to take two extra steps in and that opens up everything at the Division I level. Everything.”

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Azubuike is the best big man at the post pin that Self has ever coached. David McCormack, the favorite to start at center, hasn’t shown much in this department in his first two seasons. The falloff defensively when McCormack manned the five spot was also considerable. 

But if you’re looking for reason for hope, another hypothesis is that the effectiveness of Self’s half-court offense is especially dependent on the skill level of the power forward. Using Synergy data, here is the half-court efficiency year-to-year accompanied by the starting power forward and his offensive rating. 

This theory isn’t perfect and obviously other factors matter. In addition to a post presence who demands attention and can execute the post pin, shooting and point guard play are also critical. But you can see why Self is prioritizing skill at power forward. The numbers also show why he wants as many guys as possible on the floor who can shoot and dribble. His best offense (2017-18) started four players capable of that surrounded by Azubuike, who was extremely efficient (77 percent shooting) because help defenders were so wary of leaving shooters. 

Last season, however, was proof of what someone such as Azubuike can do in Self’s offense when he doesn’t have a ton of shooting but does have drivers. 

Azubuike had a gravitational pull that opened up driving lanes for Devon Dotson and Marcus Garrett, and as Pyper showed in his video examples, Self is terrific at creating those lanes. 

“They do the same things over and over again, but based on who they’re playing, they can switch how they run it,” Pyper says. “Like a team that traps the ball screen is different than a team that ices it, so being able to control what they do is much more important. If you’re letting the defense dictate what they’re going to do, you’re in trouble. You’re going to lose most of those scenarios because you’re not in control anymore.”

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Self uses a lot of false motion and off-the-ball movement to distract help defenders, and many of KU’s quick-hitting actions look similar early on but have different results. 

“This year they ran more horns sets than normal,” Pyper offers as an example. “He hasn’t run a ton in the past where you can enter the ball at either elbow, which I call the pressure series where basically it starts with all four players in the paint in a floppy formation and then the bigs both flash to the elbow at the same time. He’s got about six or eight looks off of that. If a team is pressuring the first one, they’ll throw it to the elbow and look for a quick backdoor.”

That looks like this: 

“Even if the defense knows it’s coming, you have to adjust for a different read if you’re guarding one elbow versus the other,” Pyper says, “and it could be a ball screen, could be a back screen, could be a backdoor cut and then you’re worried about what your player is doing and the other side. So you have to prepare for every situation.

“In my opinion, the average college player isn’t going to pick up on those scouting things, even in their senior year. They’re still going to struggle with that stuff. You watch guys go college to the NBA and that’s the first thing coaches complain about. Don’t know play calls. Don’t know defensive tendencies. The scouting report is tough. Just the ability to go to both sides causes so many problems mentally for the defense.” 

Another integral aspect of Self’s 4-game is the ball screen. The center and power forward are both heavily involved as screeners, and Self schools both the screener and the ballhandler on how to get the desired reaction out of the defense to make the play work best. For instance, he may want to entice the man defending the ball to chase over the screen, which sets off a domino effect that leads to an open shot. 

“When they’re setting the ball screen, they’re always reacting a way a team is supposed to react,” Pyper says. “The player who is setting the screen sets it at the right angle, rolls hard to the rim, seals every single time and then if the player is supposed to lift, he always lifts. If you’re supposed to fill behind, he always fills behind. If you’re supposed to replace, they replace. They rarely make mistakes mentally, and honestly, that’s half the battle when it comes to running plays and having a very good playbook, because if you can’t get players to focus and know exactly what you’re looking for on each one of the plays, if they don’t understand the why behind what you’re doing, it’ll never work.”

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One other effective wrinkle Self has added, particularly when he has a shooter such as Svi Mykhailiuk setting the screen, is to set a ghost screen that allows the shooter to quickly pop open and creates a moment of hesitation for the defense that sometimes opens up a driving lane. When considering the 2020-21 team, Self could really get creative with these actions, especially when Mitch Lightfoot, a capable 3-point shooter, is at the five. He also could experiment with Tristan Enaruna at the five. KU was forced into that lineup against Tennessee last season when McCormack and Silvio De Sousa were suspended, and included in Pyper’s video examples are some 5-out plays from that game. 

“It’s enticing,” Pyper says. “I know Self and all these college coaches watch the NBA, and the NBA runs nothing but 5-out now. You’ll see some teams do it differently, but the best teams, they run 5-out half the time with their plays and with their motion. The Rockets are obviously there. The Bucks have one of the best offenses. The Mavericks all do it. That’s where the game is going and you’re going to need more skilled bigs, and there’s different ways to roll the bigs to the post running 5-out. So I think we will see him play around with it this year and maybe early in the season against weaker competition if those games even happen.”

Self likes to have a rim protector on the floor, so he might be hesitant to go to that lineup often, although Enaruna is a good shot blocker for a wing and his block rate (3.0) last season wasn’t far off from McCormack’s (3.4). A team that made it work last season was Creighton, which had 6-foot-7 wing Christian Bishop at center and had the third-best offense in college basketball. 

The name of the game is flooding the floor with skill, and for Self, that means trying to make sure he has skilled options at the four. Although Garrett is moving over to point guard, he could still fill that role at times, and other options will include Enaruna, Tyon Grant-Foster and Jalen Wilson, each of who is 6-foot-7 or taller. KU most likely will be even deeper at this spot in 2021-22 when Self adds Adams along with sharpshooting big man Zach Clemence, who has the size to also play the five.

While KU could have a smaller frontline than usual when going to Lightfoot or Enaruna at the five, Self is going to be able to play lineups that are big on the perimeter, as other wing/guard options include Ochai Agbaji (6-5), Christian Braun (6-6) and Bryce Thompson (6-5).

It’s the deepest pool of shooters/drivers KU has had since the 2016-17 and 2017-18 groups. Those teams had an alpha scorer in Frank Mason and then Devonte’ Graham, and that is another question mark entering this season — whether the Jayhawks have that kind of scorer.

They go from the luxury of two go-to scorers in Dotson and Azubuike to not knowing who will be that guy. Losing Dotson as a point guard is not of grave concern. Garrett is plenty capable in that role. While Dotson was theoretically the point guard last season, a lot of KU’s designs were set up for Garrett to make the key pass. And one of KU’s best execution games was at Oklahoma when Garrett filled in for the injured Dotson. Garrett is not as quick as Dotson, but Self has used him in a similar way because he’s so slithery as a driver.

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But it’s just not in Garrett’s DNA to score like Dotson. The Jayhawks should, however, have more scoring threats than last season, when they were so reliant on Dotson and Azubuike. This is where the beauty of 4-game could come in. It allows playmaking opportunities for all four perimeter guys, and when all four are threats, it gets especially tricky for the defense.

The ability to tweak his offense to fit the personnel is one reason Pyper has so much respect for Self. Although the roster changes year to year, KU almost always finds its way to the elite tier of college basketball offenses. In Self’s 17 years at KU, his team has never finished outside the top 50 in adjusted offensive efficiency and has eight top-10 finishes, including in four of the last five seasons. That bump has coincided with more 4-game. 

So although Self tried to make the two-big look with McCormack and Azubuike work last year, it was more out of an effort to get McCormack more minutes rather than creating advantages. Self someday may have a roster that warrants three-out, two-in, but it probably won’t be by design. Ideally, he’ll keep recruiting to 4-game, because the numbers are impossible to ignore. 

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