AP Photo/Matthew PutneyKansas head coach Bill Self walks away after receiving a technical foul during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game against Iowa State, Saturday, Jan. 27, 2024, in Ames, Iowa.
Ames, Iowa — This year’s Kansas men’s basketball team finds itself in increasingly poor company.
By beginning their league schedule 4-3, thanks to this month’s stunning losses at UCF and West Virginia and then Saturday’s nail-biter at Iowa State, the Jayhawks have matched the worst conference start of the Bill Self era.
The last season in which KU started 4-3 in the Big 12 Conference was 2020-21, a year in which the Jayhawks spent a chunk of the season unranked and needed to win six of their final seven Big 12 just to get their record to 12-6 (21-9 overall), then lost by 34 to USC in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
That’s far from the ideal comparison for one of Self’s KU teams, particularly given that this year’s squad began the year ranked No. 1 in the AP Top 25. And yet even with the poor results of late, KU is nowhere near hitting the panic button.
Prior to the Iowa State game, Self had in fact pushed back on the notion that the matchup was a “must-win.”
“You’re going to put a must-win game in late January when our goal is to be the best we can be in March,” Self said. “I’m not buying it.”
And then after the loss at Hilton Coliseum, asked about his message to the team in the locker room, he told reporters he was “actually encouraged” by the display.
“This is the best offense we’ve run in a while,” he said. “We score 75 points against Iowa State in their building? Should be enough. We did some good things. We didn’t make shots, they outscored us (by) 21 points from beyond the arc, but I thought we hung in there and did some good things offensively.”
They did. Even with some uncharacteristic misses, Hunter Dickinson looked like his usual double-double-machine self as he racked up 20 points and 15 rebounds. Freshman Johnny Furphy showed no signs of regression and put up an increasingly reliable 15 points and six rebounds. Dajuan Harris Jr. was in command and dished out seven assists while maintaining a certain level of aggressive play.
So what issues doomed the Jayhawks, and were any of them the same from Orlando and Morgantown?
For Dickinson, perimeter defense was a common thread.
“I think we just got to do a better job of guarding the 3-point line,” he said postgame. “I think you saw that in the West Virginia game as well. I think those two losses, you can chalk up to just us not guarding the 3-point line. When you see a team hot, we got to make some adjustments.”
Self said that the Jayhawks were trying to dare forward Tre King to shoot 3s; he made four of them. The Cyclones’ 14-for-30 display didn’t quite match the accuracy of the Mountaineers’ 12-for-21 showing in Morgantown (nor the immediacy of WVU’s 9-for-11 start), but certainly helped ISU keep KU at a distance when the Jayhawks were actually executing fairly well on offense after the break. And then the Cyclones won outright thanks to Keshon Gilbert’s hard-won 3 with less than a minute to go.
There were other moments evocative of the WVU loss. While KU rebounded substantially better on Saturday than it had in Morgantown, it still missed one opportunity to come back with four minutes to go when it allowed back-to-back offensive rebounds and then committed a shooting foul as the Cyclones led 69-65 — the sort of play that allowed the Mountaineers to take that one a week earlier.
Similarly, the Jayhawks’ turnovers didn’t pile up quite like they had in Orlando — 12 total turnovers committed was well below the Cyclones’ season average for opposing teams — but they came at crucial moments and led to significant plays, including in ISU’s 13-3 second-half run.
“We did a really good job of taking care of the ball, and we had two just careless turnovers in the second half that led to uncontested layups,” Self said. “You can’t get your defense back when you have live-ball turnovers. For the most part we did a good job, but they got us on a couple, which were big.”
Then there was a new issue that reared its ugly head Saturday: defensive communication. Dickinson said the team wasn’t executing its strategy well or talking enough on the court. Self cited the example of one play on which “a guard gets frustrated because their guards are lighting us up so he fights through to try to stay and it’s a switch and it leaves the roll open.”
“There’s too many things like that,” he said. “I don’t think the trust is there for us defensively the same way it is for Iowa State defensively.”
So a variety of problems, some reflected in prior losses and others not, materialized — and yet the Jayhawks fought through them and were one stop away from potentially tying the game Saturday. They didn’t get the chance to, though, and were again on the receiving end of a court storm.
Self said that his teams often find themselves “a game or two behind” where they’re supposed to be in the conference race, but “Certainly this year will be harder because our schedule’s tougher than a lot of teams’ schedules the second half.”
Indeed, they now enter what appears to be the difficult part of their season. After Tuesday’s home date with Oklahoma State, which will enter off a win, coming up are matchups at home against Houston, at Kansas State, home against Baylor and at Texas Tech.
Staying in the title race — and maybe even making a late run like that 2020-21 team, though it ended up in second place — will require KU to “go steal one or two that maybe some think that would be a long shot,” as Self put it.
“We’ve shown this year we can beat anybody,” Self said. “Connecticut, Tennessee, Kentucky, we can beat anybody. We’ve also shown this year anybody can get us for the most part.”
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