FanPost

A (Semi) Defense of Bill Self's recent handling of Cliff Alexander

Many Kansas fans including me were frustrated with Coach Bill Self's use of Forward Cliff Alexander after the loss Saturday night to Iowa State at Hilton Coliseum. Most have heard or seen the stats from the game, but if you have not, the most glaring lack of production statistics-wise is the production of Jayhawk big men not named Perry Ellis. Ellis of course finished with 19 points on 7-14 shooting and recorded 11 rebounds in 26 minutes despite battling foul trouble throughout the game and eventually fouling out late in the game. The other four big men who logged minutes for Kansas that night were Cliff Alexander, Jamari Traylor, Landen Lucas, and Hunter Mickelson who combined for 6 points and 12 rebounds in a combined 51 minutes of play. Cliff Alexander had all 6 of those points and accumulated half of those rebounds with 6 in 14 minutes of playing time.

The KU basketball Twitter universe during and after the game was filled with confused rage on to why Coach Self chose to play both Traylor and Lucas more minutes than Alexander and give Mickelson minutes at the end of the game over him as well (Alexander played just two minutes in the second half). After the game, when asked why he sat Alexander for much of the second half Self replied "I think the big thing is you've got to play with a motor. When you’re guarding a guy that’s active on the perimeter, you've got to at least close out or be in a stance and do some things to try and guard them. I didn't think that was the case at all." Self indeed did pull Alexander after he failed to close out and defend a 3 point shot from the Cyclones' Dustin Hogue early in the 2nd half. Alexander never returned to the game.

I was very confused as to what game Self has been watching that game as it seemed asinine to me to bench a player over "motor" when his three competitors in Traylor, Lucas and Mickelson only managed to equal his rebounding performance and put up a big ol' doughnut in scoring. On twitter I saw many others express the same sentiment. If 6 points and 6 rebounds in 14 minutes isn't enough motor, what exactly is 0 points and 6 rebounds from 3 combined players in a combined 37 minutes? Kansas was desperate for another inside presence to step up besides Perry Ellis. In what turned out to be a 5 point loss on the road, couldn't they have used Alexander and both his superior rebounding and point scoring skills as opposed to any of his three replacement's minutes?

Originally when I was looking for material to write my first post on I was in disbelief still that Self underutilized Alexander so unabashedly. I felt especially vindicated in my outrage after watching Alexander put up 13 points and 13 rebounds in 23 minutes at home against Oklahoma last night. This was the player I had been watching produce for KU in limited minutes all year. I did not think on first glance that Cliff played all that differently from his past games in limited minutes. I was even dismayed to see many tweets suggesting that his good performance against Oklahoma was due to Self being some sort of master motivator. Of course I love Coach Self and the wonderful job he has done in his 12 seasons at KU but I believed that this was a case where Self had been foolishly holding a player back who could better produce for KU than the players playing ahead of him.

When I was looking into writing my first post I was thinking similarly and I assumed I would find evidence of this when I looked at the game to game statistics for Alexander's season to date. Instead what I found was some wildly inconsistent play from Alexander. There are some highlights including a memorable 16 point and 4 rebound performance filled with multiple alley-oop dunks against Tennessee in the Old Spice Classic and a solid 12 point and 10 rebound performance at home against Florida. Besides that though I found many examples of surprisingly bad statistical games for Alexander. In 26 minutes against Georgetown (his highest minutes total game of the season) he finished with just 7 points and 6 rebounds. Against Oklahoma State last week he had just 7 points and 5 rebounds in 21 minutes. Since the Florida game and before yesterday's Oklahoma game he averaged only 6.7 points and 4.6 rebounds in the 10 games between. He averaged 17.8 minutes per game in that stretch.

Jamari Traylor of course has been the main beneficiary of Alexander struggling to log consistent minutes. In the 9 games he played between the end of the Florida game and before last night's Oklahoma game (he was suspended from the Georgetown game) Traylor averaged 9 points and 4.33 rebounds in an average of 21.1 minutes per game. While of course the 3.3 minutes per game difference between the two skews the numbers slightly in Traylor's favor, the points per game numbers still favor Traylor while the rebounding numbers are slightly in Alexander's favor. Regardless, the numbers certainly don't point to any sort of definite proof that Traylor has been stealing Alexander's numbers unfairly.

Regardless of that, I still think Self made an obvious mistake not playing Alexander more than he did against Iowa State. It wasn't even Traylor taking most of Alexander's perceived minutes- it was Landen Lucas. Lucas recorded exactly 0 points and 0 rebounds in 19 minutes and it seemed every KU fan on twitter knew this yet somehow the only person in the world not aware of his lack of production was Bill Self. Alexander, had he played more minutes, would have almost certainly given us at least 1 more point and 1 more rebound compared to that Lucas stat line, and likely even more. We may not have won the game with Cliff playing more, but it undoubtedly would have been an improvement from the production we did receive.

So why am I backing off being too hard on Self for his handling of Cliff and his minutes despite the fact that it possibly cost us a key road win against one of our top threats for the Big 12 crown? Because, as the statistics of Cliff's production over the ten games before Oklahoma last night prove, Cliff Alexander most certainly did need to play with more of a motor. I like Jamari Traylor a lot, but despite his advantage of experience in Self's system, there is no way that Cliff Alexander should be putting up similar or worse numbers than Traylor. Alexander was a Top 5-ranked recruit by most recruiting lists when he arrived at Kansas this season and understandably big things were expected of him. No one expected him to be anywhere close to Andrew Wiggins or Joel Embiid who both went in the top 3 picks of the NBA draft last year, but a ten game stretch of averaging 6.7 points and 4.6 rebounds is undeniably less than what was expected of Cliff Alexander this year.

The good news is that there is a lot of basketball left to be played this season and I am still confident Alexander will figure things out to be a really good player for KU this year. Last night's 13 point and 13 rebound was very encouraging and was quietly Alexander's best rebounding performance of the season by far. The important next step for Alexander is to make the effort necessary that leads to those kind of numbers every night for Kansas, and Alexander is more than capable of doing that. I would be ecstatic by an Alexander the rest of the season that would average a double-double, and it's clear that Self thinks the same and expects Alexander to play up to that potential. Similarly earlier in the season Kelly Oubre could not find the court, but he figured things out and is not performing consistently for Kansas as perhaps its best player since late December. While I would have loved to beat Iowa State in Ames and I still think playing Cliff rather than sending him a message could have resulted in a win instead of a loss, if Cliff begins to put up numbers like last night's Oklahoma game consistently, this KU team can reach another level from where it has been playing so far this season. If we want to potentially make it to a Final Four in early April, we almost certainly will need Cliff Alexander to put up big rebounding numbers and decent scoring numbers. While I question the timing of tuning up Cliff's "motor," it undeniably was in need of a tune up.