Day: January 9, 2025

KU basketball has become a roller coaster ride. Which is not the coolest thing when you are a fan.

A week ago they lost to an undermanned, sleep-deprived West Virginia team at home. It was the first time the Mountaineers had ever won at Allen Fieldhouse. In true WVU form, they tried their hardest to blow a big lead, but KU could only tie then have two awful possessions when they had the chance to take the lead. Shame Devonte Graham or Frank Mason weren’t available.

What was most maddening about this game was that KU never looked interested in competing hard. Zeke Mayo was the only starter who seemed engaged, Flory Bidunga the only bench player who made an impact. Those two fueled the big second-half run, but the rest of the team acted like WVU wasn’t worth their attention. Maybe they thought since WVU was missing their two best players it would be a glorified practice? It should have been obvious that wasn’t the case about two minutes into the game, but it still took them until well into the second half to finally flip the switch.

Where is Bruce Webber and his Try Hard chart when you need him?!?!

Then Sunday the total opposite, as the Jayhawks went to Orlando and annihilated UCF by 1000 points. Or 51, which might as well be 1000 in college basketball. It was the biggest KU win since 2008, the biggest conference road win in school history. And the wild thing is they really didn’t play all that well on offense. They missed a ton of open 3’s. They missed so many shots at the rim. You know, evergreen KU problems. But their defense was dominant, Shak Moore moving into the starting lineup seemed to energize the team, and Bidunga had his breakout game. He blocked every shot. He grabbed every rebound. Then he did this:

Mercy. I immediately started texting friends that Bill Self needed to talk to Adidas and everyone else to double-up Flory’s NIL bag so he has zero interest in being the #25 pick in this year’s draft. Fortunately he showed some typical freshman struggles last night so I doubt we need to worry about it too much for now.[1]

If they had shown even 50% of Sunday’s effort five days earlier, the West Virginia game isn’t close. You would think a team dominated by fifth and sixth year players would understand this a little better. Alas…

Then last night’s game against Arizona State managed to combine both the WVU and UCF games into one, 40-minute package. I missed the first half, but effort again seemed to be the issue. Then the Jayhawks came out and dominated the second half, turning a six-point deficit into a 19-point win. Shak Moore was, again, the difference. As a whole the team cranked things up on the defensive end, but his back-to-back steals that turned into dunks basically ended the game midway through the second half. Wild that a few weeks ago there were rumors that he wouldn’t play the rest of the year and would likely transfer at semester and seek a medical redshirt elsewhere. Dude might have saved the season.

Let’s bullet point a few good things, and a few concerning ones.

Good Things

• Shak, obviously. Brings effort and energy and means DaJuan Harris doesn’t have the ball in his hands constantly.
• Rylan Griffen figuring it out. His defense is improving, as does his general comfort level. Seems like he has a great attitiude. With that has come more minutes and more makes.
• Flory’s continued moments of brilliance. I really need my Hoosier Jayhawk to hang in Lawrence at least two years. If he stays 2–3 years, he will be one of the best rebounders of the Bill Self era.
• Zeke Mayo as the offensive alpha. Who saw this coming?

Bad Things

• AJ Storr being a complete waste. A massive recruiting miss. He played three minutes last night and it sounds like they were a disaster.
• Hunter Dickenson’s offense. A mess. He’s 7’2” and has shot under 50% in three of his last four games. He shot just 33% against Arizona State. And it’s not like he’s shooting a ton of 3’s. He needs to plant his big ass in the low post and focus on what he’s good at.
• DaJuan Harris missing layups and bricking 3’s. Listen, DaJuan was the starting point guard on a national championship team. He doesn’t suck. But it is totally maddening that his game has not improved more than 5% on the offensive end while his defense has regressed.

Mixed Bag

• KJ Adams’ entire game. He’s been fantastic the last two games. No one plays harder. But he is so limited on offense and he doesn’t do the one thing he exels at – dunking – as much as he used to, is a mediocre rebounder, and not really a lock-down defender. Yet he starts and generally plays over 30 minutes a game. Storr really should have taken a bunch of his minutes, but that’s not going to happen. Fortunately Storr’s failure led to Bidunga getting some of KJ’s minutes. While Flory can’t do much other than dunk lobs within the offense, he’s a rebounding machine, and probably a better defender. I know Self loves KJ, but Flory playing more is the best way to maximize KU’s ceiling.
• Bill Self. Listen, you don’t want to criticize a man who has won two national titles too much, but this team’s issues mostly come down to recruiting failures of one kind or another and not being able to find the right match of personel and scheme. That’s all on the coach. He’ll figure some shit out – going to pressure turned the Arizona State game around – but my worry is that the roster has the wrong mix of talent for him to get them to their preseason expectations. This team feels reactive, and each game will present a new set of problems that Self is forced to figure out and adjust for.

It feels like you should divide the Big 12 schedule into three-game stretches. KU just dropped one in what should be their easiest, or second easiest, of those stretches. Maybe they figured some things out in there. There are clearly some structural issues, but to me the biggest thing is can we count on all five guys on the court to play hard every minute they are out there? Storr seems like he might be buried for good. The rest of the team are making progress.

However, the next three games are at Cincinnati, at Iowa State, home vs Kansas State. Good teams can go 1–2 in that stretch. Showing up for any of those game indifferent and unfocused can turn respectable losses into embarassing ones. The next 11 days will go a long way towards determining what their ceiling is.