Kansas basketball / A late-season report card

After the loss to A&M, I jotted down some notes that I titled "Resolved & Unresolved." In the subsequent five games, there has been a migration of some items from one list to the other, mostly in the direction of resolution, which is nice.

Resolved

• Rotation. Coach Self seems like he's found the right starters, and his bench guys inject energy almost every time. This was not the case last year, and even earlier this year, when Kaun, Jackson, Wright and Hawkins (last year) were in and out of his doghouse and the starting lineup. I'm not getting too excited about this, because it's one of the more elementary requirements for any deep advancement in the tournament.


• Pace. During Self's first year, it was clear that Miles, Langford, and Simien all struggled with his insistence on cohesive half-court defense, which prevented a lot of the sprinting out that characterized Roy's offense (and probably was a major part of why those guys came to KU). Langford especially seemed to struggle when he wasn't getting multiple opportunities for (relatively) easy transition baskets. This year's team seems to have fully embraced Self's approach, while also running a pretty mean fast break when they get the opportunity.


• Defense. It's Coach Self's calling card, and it ensures that KU is competitive in every game. There isn't a team in the country right now who has a definitive answer to it; I say this with confidence because Florida is really the only team that would appear to be dominant, and we all know what happened there.


• Bench. A newly resolved matter, thanks to both Sherron Collins and Shady (whose huge rebounds late in the K-State game allowed KU to steadily pull away). Darnell Jackson is always solid, and occasionally he is a total badass. Watching him tearing shit off the glass and kicking it out to RussRob is a comforting sight, especially when Kaun and Shady seem to have so much trouble laying down the law in the paint.

Unresolved

• The go-to guy. Yes, Collins has emerged as a major late-game threat. Is he a true go-to guy yet, though? I'm not sure. Coach Self gave him the ball in last possession of the A&M game, rather than Chalmers, Rush, or Wright, so clearly the staff believes that Collins can do it. He's got the moxie, not to mention the game, for making big plays late in the game, but the reason that I think that this is still unresolved is that, usually, when you've got a go-to guy, the rest of the team seems relaxed and comfortable, and this comfort translates into wins in close games. Thus far, I seen very little comfort during close games (a la Missouri, Iowa State, A&M, Texas Tech). I started to see more of it during K-State, but it still took some luck -- Rush's three-point play after Julian's terrible no-look somehow skittered through four K-State defenders -- and some K-State mistakes in order for KU to escape with a win. Nevertheless, this is getting better, no question. What needs to happen: Kansas needs to win an A&M-style game, a down-to-the-wire game in which the other team keeps bringing it (like Florida), and in that game the go-to guy needs to execute on every possession, like Acie Law of A&M did.


• Post play. If this team didn't rely on scoring in the post, I'd say that Sasha Kaun has been pretty solid. He rarely makes a bad pass; he picks up the occasional stupid foul (but seems to be getting better in this regard); he establishes position well and draws defenders. Defensively, he's rarely out of position. Little of this ever makes it on a stat sheet, and all of it contributes to open looks for other players on the offensive end, and fewer opportunities for the opponent on the defensive end. So he's solid, except for the fact that he becomes offensively inept at really inopportune times. It's hard to ignore the many, many occasions when he has failed to finish the bunnies; if he gets fouled, we all know what we're in for. Shady, on the other hand, simply needs to get hungry. All of the tools are there; they just need to be brought to bear with a little passion. Not that I'm going to make any Rudy Gay comparisons. There's no way that Self would ever allow Shady to conduct himself with the nonchalance that Gay routinely brought to UConn. What needs to happen: Shady needs to show more of what he showed against K-State; Kaun needs to convert his easy baskets; Jackson needs to keep doing what he does.


• Easy baskets. Free throws fall into this category; so do layups. I've never seen a team blow so many open, close range buckets, or brick as many FTs. Jackson and Kaun are approaching Richard Scott-level incompetence in this regard, and even Chalmers and RussRob (admittedly, my favorite of the current Hawks, esp. after he got in Cartier Martin's face during the K-State game) isn't 100% reliable down the stretch. And Rush missed the two FT's after Huggy's T, which could have put KU up by 7. (Good thing Collins hit a three in the ensuing possession). Anyway, one virtue of Roy's teams is that they seem to get 10-15 easy baskets every game: fast break layups and dunks; post guys who get sprung open by a back screen; open jumpers for the big guys trailing the fast break. Self's teams must get fewer of these looks, which may be okay since they seem to have trouble converting them anyway. What needs to happen: It may be impossible for this team to become a good FT-shooting team, but it's eminently possible for them to make layups, especially Kaun.

Small worlds / Phil Collins, The World Won't Listen

I met Phil Collins (the British artist, not the British pop star¹) at a bar in Brooklyn in the mid 90's. At the time, I didn't know him as "the British artist," I knew him only as my friend Tom's legendary boyfriend. I remember little of the night, but I do remember a hubbub accompanying Phil Collins's wanderings around the bar; he seemed to create some kind of event wherever he went. At some point, he approached the table with two tall drinks, placed them in front of me, and said something like "These are from an admirer of yours."

As it turned out, they were from an admirer of his, and this admirer perceived, shall we say, a lack of gratitude when his drinks were given away. There was a confrontation, as I recall, and Phil said something like, "Well, I'm sorry, I never turn down a drink, but you can't honestly expect me to drink [disbelieving voice] rum & coke?" (Or whatever the drinks were).

All of which serves as background to my reaction to Phil Collins's piece, The World Won't Listen, at SFMOMA, which was pretty excellent. The premise is pretty simple: He filmed young Turkish folks singing along to The Smiths best-of compilation "The World Won't Listen." The effect, on the other hand, is deep and resonant. The Smiths' odes to teenagerdom -- all vacillating emotions, frustrated inarticulations, piercing moments of understanding, sexual ambiguity -- take on a deeper social dimension through the voices of (in many of the cases) non-English speakers. Add to this the fact that the singers are Middle Eastern, and it becomes difficult to avoid a political reading. Songs like "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" sounds less the over-dramatic nihilism of a Western teenager and more like a very real plea from a teenager caught in an increasingly fundamentalist world:

Take me out tonight
Because I want to see people and I
Want to see life
Driving in your car
Oh, please don't drop me home
Because it's not my home, it's their
Home, and I'm welcome no more

Really impressive.

Cool: a web posting for the event that he filmed.

¹ Speaking of the British pop star, here's a classic: The video for "Sussudio" [YouTube]

National nightmares / Restoring a modicum of utility to the Complete New Yorker

I was one of the suckers who pre-ordered The Complete New Yorker magazine. I am a long-long-time New Yorker reader, and the enticement was just too powerful -- 8 DVDs filled with 60+ years of cultural commentary, quirky cartoons and cool cover art, all in a distinct highbrow-yet-practical-minded voice and scanned in at super-high-res? For a few extreme dorks, this was intensely exciting. Expectation-wise, it was like the release of a smartypants Playstation 3.

Upon arrival, it also resembled Playstation 3, in that it sucked, big-time. My experience improved slightly after The Occasional Scrivener posted a hack that allows you to copy issues from the 8 independent DVDs onto your hard drive. An extreme dork after my own heart. Many thanks.

The really big, un-hackable problem: The search tool is a house of horrors. Imagine that you've finally been introduced to a long-time idol, let's say Bob Dylan, and he agrees to come home with you and sit in your living room and tell you anything you want to know. But then when you ask him to tell you the complete story of the "Judas!" show, you realize that he doesn't speak English; he just sits there silently, impassive. That's how this thing makes me feel.

The whole point of getting Complete New Yorker is to have your mind blown by the wealth of cool stuff in the older issues. Therefore, the challenge faced by the interaction designers is to facilitate getting at that stuff, i.e. MAKE IT EASY TO SEARCH for what you want. The shot below represents the Procrustean bed on which each searcher must lie.



The really egregious crimes have been documented elsewhere, but I would just like to add:

• Performance that reminds me of the 90's. If this had been released in 1998, I could easily forgive the lag everytime a button is pressed or a search is executed. But really, when I type "white" into the general search field, and it churns for nearly 20 seconds, I don't know, it makes me homicidally mad. Anger at slow performance is like road rage -- once you've got it, you can't get rid of it, no matter how much you avoid being in a car.


• Why the cruel and unusual search complexity? Searching is never made easier by surfacing every possible method of doing so right off the bat. Google -- the world's most popular search interface -- seems like an effective guide here. Start simple, and reveal sophistication when necessary. There aren't really even that many ways I could conceive of searching the Complete New Yorker -- author, date article title, date range ... That's about it.


• Wasted vertical real estate. Nearly 33% of the vertical space is consumed by tool chrome, those thick gray bars segmenting the screen. Combined with the often bizzare and mostly useless "Abstract" below, this leaves 11 rows for search results, the place where users (I) make decisions on what to launch in the viewer. Unforgiveable.


• What the heck is this thing called?. The fact that the search results do not contain a highly valuable piece of information -- umm, the title of the piece -- makes it a pain in the butt to scan (for instance) the stories of JD Salinger, the assorted work of EB White. Actually, pretty much every search is complicated by this.

I could go on and on, but I won't. Here's my suggestion for CNY 2.0: Consolidate the existing widgets into one widget with modest dynamic behaviors. The widget would have one simple initial menu that determines how you want to search -- keyword, author, issue, department. This selection then determines the filters you'll need -- if you choose "keyword," maybe you get "department" and "date" as filters.

In doing this, you buy back all of that chrome real estate, allowing more results to be displayed. Win, win, win. Of course none of this matters much if database performance isn't improved, but here it is anyway: