Yeesh. Quite a weekend for basketball stuff, so I guess that will be my focus today. Let’s get the worst of it out of the way first. Feel free to skip; it ain’t brief.
Jayhawk Talk
I’ll begin by saying I’ve never been happier to have missed watching a KU game live than I was Saturday. Yet I was still angry and frustrated later that evening because I had checked the score just as KU took a 21-point lead on Baylor late in the first half and felt pretty good about how things would turn out. The next time I checked the score it was a four-point game. This was concerning. The final time I checked the score Baylor was up by seven with a couple minutes left. That’s when the relief kicked in that I hadn’t devoted my late afternoon/early evening to watching this shitshow and would then sit and stew about it the rest of the night.
Coming on the heels of last weekend’s disaster against Houston and then Tuesday’s near disaster against UCF, I think we can officially call this a trend. Or, better yet, just what this team is. Which is not very good, relatively speaking. With an angry Iowa State team, that got wrecked at home by a mediocre K-State team Saturday, coming to Lawrence tonight, it sure feels like it’s going to get worse, too.
I guess there is still the opportunity to make adjustments that paper over some of this team’s issues. I doubt even the most optimistic of KU fans thinks that’s likely, though. Making this feel like not only a lost season, but a lost mini-era. And hopefully not the end of something bigger.
The transfer portal/NIL era was supposed to be a gift for Bill Self. He had just won his second national title and Jay Wright had retired, leaving Self as the unquestioned Best Coach in the Game. The NCAA probe was also over. Self was going to clean up in recruiting, whether in the portal or with high school kids, and put himself in a great position to win at least one more title before he decided to retire.
The problem is that his portal success has been decidedly mixed. Kevin McCullar Jr. was great for a year and a half, arguably the best player in the country for the first six weeks of the ’23–24 season until his knee gave out on him. Hunter Dickinson is flawed and takes a lot of deserved heat for that, but for the most part he’s been good to very good. Zeke Mayo has been KU’s best player most of this season, although he mixes in the occasional stinker.
But pretty much every other transfer has been anywhere from mediocre to terrible. And that has wrecked the culture of the program.
What made KU so good for those 14 straight years they won the Big 12? It was the continuity in the program, the proverbial Culture. The Jayhawks didn’t always have the best talent, or the best pro talent I guess. But they always had the best combination of talent and experience. It was those top 50–60 recruits that stayed for three and four years and learned how to play for Self and understood the rigors of the Big 12 who made the biggest plays in the biggest games.
Those guys are gone. DaJuan Harris and KJ Adams have such limited games that they can’t fill the Ochai Agbaji, Devonte Graham, Frank Mason, Landon Lucas, Perry Ellis, Jeff Withey, Elijah Johnson, Tyshawn Taylor, Sherron Collins roles of carrying a team that is struggling in crunch time to a win in Ames or Manhattan or even in Allen Fieldhouse. I just don’t think that’s in Dickinson’s DNA, even with him being a second-year Jayhawk. And none of the other transfers or freshmen have any idea what to do in those moments.
There’s another big red flag here, one I’m reluctant to address. KU had won the Big 12 and was headed for a number one seed in the NCAA tournament when Self had his heart attack in March 2023. Without him, and without Harris who rolled his ankle just before halftime, KU blew a big second half lead over Arkansas in the second round of the NCAA tournament. That was seen as a blessing in disguise, as under-seeded UConn was waiting in the next round and would have destroyed KU, just like they destroyed everyone else that spring.
Since then it’s been an uncharacteristically mid run for KU. Some good wins in the early part of each season, followed by more really bad losses than I can remember as teams learned how to attack KU and the Jayhawks seemed to have no answers. Last year they were blown out in the second round by Gonzaga. Has this team done anything for the past month that suggests a third-straight second round loss is their ceiling?
Some of KU’s issues are talent. Harris and Adams are such one-dimensional players that when they can’t do those things well – basically defense for Harris and effort for Adams – they are giant holes on the court. Putting more pressure on the other three players out there with them, most of whom have their own flaws. Dickinson is a scoring savant in the low post and can grab 10 rebounds without trying. However, he’s a huge liability on defense if he has to take more than one step. He’s regressed when he takes shots away from the basket. Mayo, as hot as he can get, also has games where he can’t hit a thing and forces things to the point where he turns the ball over. And so on.
If you read back through my KU posts for the past 21 years, you’ll find that I was always whining about something each team doesn’t do well. But the teams that didn’t shoot well could still get to the rim and score there. Ones that struggled to guard could at least rebound. Teams that were offensively challenged could choke the life out of the game on the defensive end.
This year’s team has no identity, no strength, no experience to fall back on when they can’t hit 3’s and can’t get to the rim and the defense breaks down and they get out-rebounded. Their two homegrown senior leaders are players that should be backups or complimentary players, not the guys who make the tough ass plays in the last three minutes that turn an L into a W.
Self recruited this roster, and the ones the two previous years that also had massive flaws. The bad portal players have been so bad that they counter-balance a lot of the credit he should get for bringing in McCullar/Dickinson/Mayo. High school recruiting has been uneven for several years, although the incoming class seems like a return to form. He’s refused, for whatever reason, to recruit over Harris and Adams, and neither of them has improved much in their time on campus.
No matter how much we want to ignore it, we have to wonder if Self lost something in his health scare two years ago. Has he dialed back his intensity, and that spills over to the team? Is his preparation time less rigorous than it was? Does he process things a half step slower than he used to? Is there some other issue that he hides in public but which affects how he coaches? I sure hope this is all coincidental, but it’s a question that has to be considered.
A good buddy of mine shared this hot take after the back-to-back Creighton-Missouri losses in December: this would be Self’s last year. He thought this team would drive Self to pull a Jay Wright and go sit on a beach or work on TV. I argued that Self has raved as much about Darryn Peterson as he has any recruit ever, and there’s no way, health allowing, that he won’t be back to coach him next year. But, I added, after that all bets are off. If the passion is gone, he could retire any time after next season.
After the last week I have to wonder if leaving after this year might truly be on the table. Again, I sure as hell hope not and am frantically lighting candles, saying prayers, and rubbing rabbit feet to guard against this option. We need to keep kicking that nightmare scenario down the road as long as we can.
In reality Self just won a national title three years ago. He was chasing his third, which would place him in the truly all-time elite list of coaches, and made some big swings that ended up being huge misses. I don’t think he suddenly forgot how to coach, or his methods stopped working in 2023.
The modern era of Kansas Basketball began on March 10, 1984, when Ron Kellogg hit a baseline jumper to beat #6 Oklahoma in the Big 8 tournament championship game. We Jayhawk fans have had things pretty good for over 40 years. I think it’s way too early for us to start worrying about KU falling into the pattern that Indiana has been stuck in for over 20 years. There are some concerning cracks in the foundation, though.
HS Hoops + Injury Update
The final week of the regular season was not great.
Tuesday we took on Carmel. The JV game went down to the final seconds, and we hit a shot with about three ticks left to get a one-point win. I enjoyed the Carmel coaches getting super heated with the refs for not giving them a time out as the clock ran out. It went on for several minutes after the game, and then our athletic director had to keep one of the coaches from approaching the refs as they left the gym. I would have been equally livid had that happened to us. L again didn’t play much, and she was annoyed about it after the game. On the one hand I understood her frustration. On the other, she is clearly compromised and can’t do a ton so I totally got why the coaches didn’t play her much. She had four points, an assist, and three steals.
The varsity game was kind of a mess. Carmel lost their best player to a knee injury a month ago and had gone 2–6 since. If we played smart, we should win. We were up with a couple minutes left until we let a freshman hit consecutive 3’s to give them the lead. Our offense couldn’t get a thing going on the other end and we lost by three. Carmel is really well coached and has some nice players, but this is not a game that a team that wants to make a serious run in the tournament should lose.
Thursday we traveled 75 minutes south to play one of the worst programs in the state. They had sent word earlier in the week that they only had six JV players, so asked if the JV game could just be two quarters. Lovely. We’re spending over an hour in the car for half a JV game then a varsity game that shouldn’t be close.
JV took care of business, winning easily. L was even more limited in minutes and had just an assist and a turnover.
Varsity jumped out to a big lead, I think it got as high as 30 early in the second half, but then got sloppy and never reached running clock territory. We ended up winning by 24. The JV parents were annoyed because CE had 11 girls dressed for varsity. They easily could have moved a couple down for JV so we could have played a full game. I mean, the varsity team ended the season 1–19. It’s not like they go 10 deep with decent players.
JV ended the year 17–3. A terrible, blowout loss to start the year. The other two losses L is convinced we would have won had she been healthy and available. A really good season for a team dominated by sophomores. I just wish a few of those sophomores were obviously kids that could step in and start for varsity next year.
Varsity ended the regular season at 14–9. Three of those losses were by three points or less. I can’t say I’m super confident about sectionals because this team has never really locked in for multiple games in a row. They struggle to make shots and are too reliant on our leading scorer for offense, and she’s far from an unstoppable player. Our defense is spotty. We have no size so struggle to rebound. We don’t have a deep bench. Oh, and there’s the matter of playing our arch rival we beat three weeks ago in the opening game of the tournament. I’m not sure if I have a worse feeling about tonight’s KU game or Tuesday’s CHS one.
It’s a knock-out tournament, though, and anything can happen. When two Catholic schools are playing God obviously sits back, eats popcorn, and watches rather than taking a side.
L did make the sectional roster, so she’s continued to practice with the varsity. In theory. I don’t think she did much Friday or Saturday, and Saturday her foot hurt so bad that she went back to the crutches when she got home.
If you’ve made it this far I’ll share the biggest bad news of this post last: she is scheduled for an MRI on Thursday, and we’re pretty sure she’s going to need surgery. That will knock her out for most, if not all, of the travel season. I’ll share more about that once we get results/confirmation, but it’s obviously been a rough couple of weeks for her. She didn’t make varsity to start the season, had to stop playing three games in, was never fully healthy when she returned, and is now looking at another long stretch without basketball. I think she’d love a do-over for her sophomore year, at least for basketball.
NBA
HOLY SHIT!!!!
The biggest, dumbest trade in NBA history took place late Saturday night. Luka Doncic to the Lakers, Anthony Davis to the Mavericks. Plus other parts and picks.
If you don’t follow the NBA, Doncic is one of the three best players in the world, when he’s healthy. He’s been out since Christmas, though, and has a history of not taking care of his body. Which may have been the reason Dallas moved him. Davis was once a top five player in the league, but now probably somewhere between 15–20 most nights, with the random night he can still go nuts. But Doncic is seven years younger than Davis. And Dallas didn’t get nearly enough back for him.
This is an insane trade if you’re Dallas. You are basically gambling that Doncic’s body is going to fail on him sooner rather than later. But instead of leveraging his ability and age, you treated him like he was an equal to Davis.
It makes no sense to me why/how you make this trade. Worse, it hands a golden ticket to the Lakers, who somehow always come up with deals that get them superstars just as they are reaching their peaks. If Luka listens to LeBron and gets healthy and takes his fitness seriously, they could be a monster next year.
The NBA pods were insanely fun the past 24 hours as people tried to make sense of this trade. The conspiracy theories are A++++ at the moment!
A few hours later, Sacramento sent De’Aaron Fox to San Antonio. This wasn’t as seismic, and the Kings actually got a decent return. What made this huge was that Victor Wembanyama now has a legit running mate, along with several other nice, young players around him. This probably doesn’t do much for the team this year. It does make them title contenders as soon as next year.
I have college buddies who are big Mavericks and Kings fans. When the Fox trade broke last night, I told them I am now going to start getting worried that either Tyrese Haliburton or Pascal Siakam gets moved before the trade deadline Thursday.
Fever
There was some actual good basketball news in our house: the Fever made some great moves over the weekend. First they re-signed Kelsey Mitchell, Caitlin Clark’s backcourt running mate. Then they traded for two former All Stars with championship rings, Natasha Howard and DeWanna Bonner. Both are on the back ends of their careers but have experience and size and versatility that the Fever needed. Finally they added shooter in Sophie Cunningham. Through all that they also managed to keep super-sub Lexie Hull, for the time being at least.
We’ll see how these all work out, but on paper they make the Fever much better. Especially when you figure Clark should be steadier and stronger as a second-year player than she was as a rookie.