Dynamic four-guard lineup required complete buy-in from Kansas coaches, players

By Matt Tait     May 21, 2017

Nick Krug
Kansas head coach Bill Self and Kansas guard Frank Mason III (0) pound fists as Mason leaves the game late in the second half on Sunday, March 19, 2017 at BOK Center in Tulsa, Okla.

When Kansas basketball assistant coach Kurtis Townsend first got wind of the idea that KU coach Bill Self wanted to tinker with a four-guard lineup for the 2016-17 season, Townsend was hardly surprised.

Sure, Self had been known throughout his career as the type of coach who favored the high-low system and playing from the inside out, but, as Townsend instantly recalled, it was not as if Self had never tweaked things in the past.

Immediately, Townsend was taken back to the 2004-05 season, just before the start of Big 12 play, when All-American forward Wayne Simien went down with an injured hand and missed the next month.

“I remember that like it was yesterday,” Townsend told the Journal-World during a 20-minute sit-down in early May. “We lost Wayne Simien so we went from playing our traditional high-low offense into ball screen stuff. We sat in coach’s office, I swear it had to be ’til 3-3:30 in the morning going, ‘God, we gotta figure out how to use Keith (Langford) more and to get him more involved.’ So we sat up here and we came up with what we call “fist” now, which is our ball-screen stuff.”

The initial returns were awful. So much so that Townsend said he remembered Self turning to his assistants during the high-profile Georgia Tech game on New Year’s Day 2005 and telling them that they were going to have to trash the new offense.

But then things started to click. Langford became more aggressive and, at times, looked unstoppable and the Jayhawks beat the Yellow Jackets, 70-68 in overtime, exacting revenge for an Elite-Eight loss a season earlier. Eight days later, KU went into Kentucky and came away with a six-point win over the Wildcats, thanks largely to their new-look offense.

“We had some plays that involved ball screens before that,” Townsend said of Self’s second Kansas squad. “But our bread and butter was to come down and get in the high-low and reverse the ball. We still have that, but now we run that more out of plays and we do more ball-screen stuff as part of our regular offense, so it got flipped.”

While that experiment was a departure from the norm, it did still incorporate the more traditional lineup of three guards and two big men.

Moving to four guards last season, with freshman Josh Jackson playing big inside, was the next step, and Townsend said he had confidence it would work because he knew Self had enjoyed success while changing on the fly in the past.

So this time around there were no late-night meetings in the coach’s office.

“I’m glad, too,” Townsend said. “Because I was 13 years younger then and I don’t know if I could’ve stayed up that late any more.”

The whole purpose of moving to the four-guard lineup that led the 2016-17 Jayhawks to yet another No. 1 seed, a 31-5 record and the brink of the Final Four was to take full advantage of the personnel Self had at his disposal. With a five-man rotation in the backcourt representing the bulk of KU’s talent, the guard-heavy attack allowed Self to get his best players onto the floor for more minutes each game.

“That takes a lot to change it up like that, and I think there’s a lot more behind the scenes that we didn’t even realize,” said KU big man Landen Lucas while looking back on the philosophical shift. “I mean, it’s one thing to adjust how you think and adjust things like that, but he pretty much had to adjust our playbook and everything. He went and studied tape of other teams. It was a lot of work that went into it.”

It’s not as if Self had to do it this way either. And many other coaches may not have. With former McDonald’s All-American Carlton Bragg Jr., on the roster, Self easily could have elected to stick with the three-guard-two-big-man lineup in hopes of Bragg finding his way through the early funk that wound up lingering all season.

Instead, Self acted boldly, rolled the dice and put his faith in the fact that Jackson, an absolute menace on the offensive end, could do enough defensively to keep the Jayhawks alive. It worked. Jackson was one of the better defensive players in the Big 12 and KU’s unquestioned defensive stopper.

The one-and-done freshman’s length, competitiveness and tenacity allowed the Jayhawks to then focus on how to make things work offensively. And, while that, too, was a work in progress, it eventually led to Kansas becoming one of the nation’s most dangerous point-scoring teams.

“I think the thing we had to teach the most was spacing,” Townsend said. “So we put X’s in the corners and we’d make sure that the corners were filled and then out top it just opened everything up and we had guys like Josh and Frank (Mason III), who could really drive the ball and force help and kick to shooters. It just worked for us.”

Added Lucas: “At first, it was an experiment. Coach Self had to see how it looked, but he wasn’t gonna commit to anything. But the more he saw and found out about it, he noticed that it actually worked really well for us.”

There was one time, Lucas recalled, early on in the process, when Self did not seem convinced that the new system was the way to go.

“The only time he doubted it was when he started to realize that, offensively, we didn’t have enough yet,” Lucas recalled. “I don’t know if he doubted it as much as he just knew we just needed to add more. We had good flow, we played well together but then it was like, ‘OK, this is limiting because we’ve never used it and we didn’t have many plays.’ So if there was any doubt it was how to add more to the offense. But he quickly fixed that by studying other teams and stuff and once we got plays in he knew that that was the best way for us to play.”

While the first examples of Self’s willingness to change when necessary date back to his early days at Kansas, the infant stages of the offense Kansas used last season actually surfaced a year earlier and was a product of what Townsend said was a cultural shift in how basketball was being played at all levels.

“Perry (Ellis) was close because we did play him out there a little bit and let him open up and drive,” Townsend said, comparing Ellis’ role his senior season to that of Jackson’s during his freshman year. “So I would say that’s where it started, where we started going, ‘Hey, we could play four guards.’ But Perry wasn’t quite the play-maker Josh was and he was bigger.”

The beauty of what the 2016-17 season did for Self and the Jayhawks had to do with predictability. No longer could teams prepare for Kansas to be a team that only pounds it inside and tries to overpower you by scoring over you.

When the personnel dictates that, there’s no doubt that Self will take advantage. But when it doesn’t, he now has shown that he’s both willing and able to flip things 180 degrees while still getting the same results.

“I think it shows a lot,” Lucas said. “It shows his willingness to be open-minded. He hates to lose and loves to win, and he’ll do whatever he has to do if he thinks it’ll help the team.”

As for whether he’ll look to employ the four-guard lineup again in the near future, Self took a simple approach to answering that question.

“If we could find a 6-8 guard that could play like Josh, sure,” he said. “That would obviously change things. The reality of it is, based on our personnel the way it is today, that personnel will demand that you’ll at least play small some. And it probably will, but I’m not going into it believing that this is the way we want to play.”

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Written By Matt Tait

A native of Colorado, Matt moved to Lawrence in 1988 and has been in town ever since. He graduated from Lawrence High in 1996 and the University of Kansas in 2000 with a degree in Journalism. After covering KU sports for the University Daily Kansan and Rivals.com, Matt joined the World Company (and later Ogden Publications) in 2001 and has held several positions with the paper and KUsports.com in the past 20+ years. He became the Journal-World Sports Editor in 2018. Throughout his career, Matt has won several local and national awards from both the Associated Press Sports Editors and the Kansas Press Association. In 2021, he was named the Kansas Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sports Media Association. Matt lives in Lawrence with his wife, Allison, and two daughters, Kate and Molly. When he's not covering KU sports, he likes to spend his time playing basketball and golf, listening to and writing music and traveling the world with friends and family.