Day: January 23, 2024

Fans can be overly dramatic about tiny moments in a long season, both good and bad. Keep that in mind when I tell you that Johnny Furphy has saved KU’s season.

He certainly saved the game Monday against Cincinnati, the only KU player who seemed to be locked in and engaged for every minute he was on the court. He had a career-high 23 points on 7–8 shooting, grabbed 11 rebounds (also a career high), kept several other balls alive until teammates could grab them, and hit the biggest shot of the night, a 3 as the shot clock expired to put KU up 10 with about four minutes to play in what ended up as a five-point win.

Crazy that a kid I doubt any KU fan knew about and wasn’t on anyone’s recruiting radar for the current season until late in July has become exactly the piece the Bill Self was looking for to fill the gaping hole in his lineup.

Furphy is a freshman, so there will be regression as defenses focus on him. He can get bullied on the defensive end because of his slight build. He’s not going to continue to average 17 & 8. However, the threat he presents can open up space for his teammates and he is long enough that he can still be disruptive on defense and on the boards even when physically overmatched.

Despite Johnny’s emergence, this team remains maddening.

Monday both Hunter Dickinson and Kevin McCullar seemed to be laboring with their mysterious “knee issues.” It didn’t help that for the first time this year Dickinson was in foul trouble. KJ Adams also seemed off. Since it is January, I wondered if those three were all sick, as their energy levels seemed lower than normal. More likely it’s just that they are asked to play 35+ minutes a night and are already getting worn down with seven weeks of Big 12 basketball in front of them.

Sigh.

The most concerning performance of the night, though, was Dajuan Harris’. He missed two wide-open layups. Three of his turnovers were brain-dead mistakes, throwing the ball directly to a UC player. Plus he forgot to catch a pass from Furphy that hit him in the hands. Dajuan has always been polarizing simply because there are nights where his shit doesn’t work, generally against more physical opponents. Yet there are also games when he punishes bigger, faster, stronger players. You would think by year five of a player’s career those lows wouldn’t be as low, even if we’ve accepted his highs can only be so high. He’s been in a bit of a funk all year.

Self defends Harris, saying that sometimes when you are trying a little harder to share the ball, you are also going to turn it over more. I don’t buy that. Harris was always hyper efficient. He might have Meh games, but rarely was he guilty of the unforced errors he’s been routinely making this year.

I don’t have an explanation, and thus no solution. He needs to get his shit together, since this team has a very narrow margin of error each night. A steady, boring point guard will be just fine.

Monday’s game was entirely too close. Cincinnati did not play well – mostly a function of KU’s defense – but the Jayhawks could not shake them. If you take away all those unforced errors by Harris, and 80%+ free throw shooter McCullar missing four freebies, the final margin is much more comfortable. There aren’t many opportunities for comfy wins in the Big 12, and Monday seemed like a chance to get one. Instead it went to the final minutes with the result still in doubt.

Self, and this team, need to find a way to manage the stretches when all five starters are not on the court. They’ve been starting games well, only to fall apart when a couple starters check out 5–6 minutes into the first half. After the game Self preached that depth is overrated in March, which is very true. But you have to get to March in a good place to maximize the opportunity for your starters to rip off wins. Right now I’m not super confident KU is going to win any Big 12 road games, and several of the home games frighten me. No matter how good the starting five is, or how much the Big 12’s strength helps KU’s analytical rankings, going in as a 3–4–5 seed means the path to the second and third weekends of the tournament is incredibly difficult no matter how talented the starting five is.

M and I didn’t have any contact before or during the game Monday. I wasn’t happy enough with the result to reach out after the game. She did text me about 10 minutes later, saying she heard someone on her floor yell “What the fuck is a Jayhawk, anyway?”

Naturally I replied with a very patronizing explanation of how Jayhawkers were anti-slavery forces dedicated to keeping Kansas a Free State and saving America. Then we started exchanging GIFs, me sending ones of Big Jay and Baby Jay, she sending me ones of the Bearcat. She is a big fan of the Bearcat.

Good times.

I was only able to watch the first half of Saturday’s game against West Virginia, a loss that seemed really bad in the moment but that I think will be respectable when the season ends. West Virginia had won just six games going into that contest, which seemed shitty. What people don’t factor in, or the Mountaineers’ BPI rating reflects, is that they got multiple starters eligible less than a month ago and are still missing one starter because of injury.

Don’t get me wrong, KU should have won that game. They scored 85 points and had just seven turnovers in a road game. 95% of the time that means a W. For some reason a 30% shooting team hit everything they threw up in the first half, often when well guarded, and carried that confidence over to the second half when they refused to fade even when the 3’s stopped dropping. Apparently there were a few maddening missed shots, defensive closeouts, and horrible missed block-outs that were huge factors in KU’s loss. I’m glad I didn’t see those, I might not have slept.

As I said, though, West Virginia has almost all their expected starters in the lineup now. They’ve beaten KU and Texas in consecutive weeks. RaeQuan Battle is going to score 35 on someone. You can’t say anything with certainty in this Big 12 schedule. I would bet that not many teams are going into Morgantown and winning, though. Which will make KU’s loss seem less bad and more of a missed opportunity.

I missed the second half of that game because of L’s games. I believe I’ve shared before that there is another KU dad on her squad, although he was a graduate and law student there.[1] S loves watching this dad and I during games because we see the game in very similar ways. He usually sits a few rows in front of us and will get agitated about something – sometimes a call/no call, other times something one of our girls does – and start looking around for support. Eventually he’ll find me and I’ll say, “I saw it too, C!” and he gets this relieved look on his face, like “I’m not crazy, right?” Then S laughs.

Anyway, Saturday CHS started as KU was wrapping up. We both had our phones balanced on our knees while we watched our daughters. Each dead ball we’d check the KU score then look at each other and shake our heads or pump our fists.

The funniest part, though, came at halftime of the CHS game. He came up to sit by me and we broke the KU game down. Keep in mind, we didn’t see any of the second half. But based on what ESPN, Twitter, and text messages told us, we were still analyzing how it went. I thought about that later and laughed at us.

It is much easier to take these losses when you don’t see them. Maybe instead of clearing the family calendar in March for the last 19 years, I should have made sure we had things scheduled when KU played. My blood pressure might be a lot lower.

Also Saturday, M called me right when the KU-WVU game got to the under–4:00 timeout in the first half. I paused the ESPN app on my TV and talked to her for about 20 minutes so she could tell me all about going to the UC game earlier. When we finished talking, I hit play on my remote. Instead of picking up at the moment I had paused it, the app skipped to live TV, which was in the middle of halftime.

What the fuck?

I needed to eat something before we left so I paused it just to test if I had done something wrong. I ate my sandwich then pressed play. Again the feed jumped to live action, this time as play had just begun in the second half.

I don’t know if this is an Amazon issue – we use a FireStick on this TV – or an ESPN issue. Whoever designed this function, though, obviously has no idea how pausing a live program is supposed to work. Truly maddening.

Finally, this is Jayhawk related, so I’ll throw it in as well.