Hoops Notes

Let’s run through some quick hoops thoughts.

Jayhawk Talk

As expected Darryn Peterson did not play last night against Duke. As expected, Duke won comfortably. Not as expected was KU showing a lot of fight and progress from last week’s games. There was still, obviously, a big hole on offense due to Peterson’s absence. But the Jayhawks controlled the first 15 minutes of the game and were in terrific shape until first Flory Bidunga and then Tre White went to the bench with three fouls before halftime.

In each of my in-game discussion threads, pretty much every other KU fan I interacted with was positive about how the team played. Way too many missed 3’s, but it’s KU, that’s going to be the case. Too many rebounds given up, but Duke is one of the biggest teams in the country and that will happen. And just too much bad offense because the alpha was not on the court. The ball definitely sticks late in the shot clock and guys who are not natural scorers pretend that they are. White and Bidunga did their best. Melvin Council probably tried to do too much. Kohl Rosario and Bryson Tiller had games you expect of freshmen against Duke in Madison Square Garden.

You can see all the potential, though. You see the athleticism, the energy, and what seemed to be a pretty positive team despite the result. Get Peterson back and this team is fine.

And the 1988 throwback uniforms? Spectacular. That little splash of yellow has never been repeated in a KU uniform set, as far as I can recall, and sets these apart. The block K on the shorts? Fabulous! It also helped the team that wore these won the national championship with the greatest player in program history. If I collected jerseys I would absolutely own one of these.

High School Hoops

Two games to get caught up on.

Last Thursday we drove out to Mooresville, about 50 minutes away from our house just past the Indianapolis airport, last Thursday for the second game of the year. MHS is normally a very strong program; they reached the semistate finals just three years ago. I had this listed as a game that would be very tough to win.

We started the game on an 11–0 run and never looked back. We were up by 30 most of the second half, and L and all the other juniors played the entire fourth quarter. Our energy as a team was night-and-day from the opener two nights earlier. The offense looked better, the defense ratcheted up. And we pressed a lot more than we had in the opening game.

Before that fourth quarter run L played 5–6 total minutes again. For the game she was 0–3 from the field, an assist, two steals, a turnover.

Last night we played the #6 ranked 4A team, which was coming off a two-point, overtime loss to the #2 team in the state. They have two D1 commits and are traditionally a very strong program. Last year, when they had another D1 girl, we uglied it up and lost by 12 in a game we missed a million free throws.

This year? Yeesh, not as good.

We fell behind early and never got the offense going. We basically trailed by 16 the entire game, lucky that HSE was not hitting from deep, until they finally made some 3’s late to make it a comfortable 21-point win.

L got in for the last 90 seconds and didn’t do anything to register in the boxscore. She and one of her former travel teammates did guard each other for that stretch.

Friday night we drive down near Louisville to play a team that has a girl who is going to KU next fall. Then Saturday we host the #9 4A team, who moved up after winning 3A last year. They also played last night, and beat the #1 4A team by 13. Yikes.