Late return fitting finish following KU’s loss to Kentucky

By Gary Bedore     Nov 19, 2014

Nick Krug
Kansas guard Sviatoslav Mykhailiuk leans down for a talk with head coach Bill Self during the second half of the Champions Classic on Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2014 at Bankers Life Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.

Kansas University’s basketball players and coaches, who hoped to be sleeping in their own beds between 1 and 2 a.m., Wednesday, instead reclined at Topeka Regional airport shortly before the sun came up.

“It was kind of cute. There was nothing cute about what happened (in Tuesday night’s 72-40 loss to Kentucky in Indianapolis), but when we finally got home, all the guys were crashed on couches before the bus got there,” KU coach Bill Self said, entering storyteller mode on Wednesday night’s Hawk Talk radio show.

“Svi (Mykhailiuk, Ukrainian freshman guard) was the only one sitting up. I said, ‘Svi … hey, I’m sorry, man. I know you guys travel a lot better in the Ukraine than here.’ He said, ‘No coach. This is great compared to Ukraine. It’s a 10-hour bus ride everywhere we go,”’ Self added, speaking with a foreign accent.

“It kind of put everything in perspective.”

KU’s traveling party, already in a sour mood after the Kentucky thrashing, finally arrived at Jayhawker Towers about the same time most folks sat down for breakfast before work or school.

“They had to fly a part from Dallas up to Indy. We got to the (Indy) airport at 2 or 3 (Eastern time) and waited for it (charter plane) to be fixed. By the time we flew into Topeka, we had to wait an hour and a half to get a bus there to pick us up,” Self said. “It was a tough travel day. I’d just as soon it be tough. I mean we deserved everything we got. I figured we’d have a flat tire on the way home, too.”

Thankfully the flat didn’t happen, but … “It was not a good trip. It was very fitting we had all kind of problems getting home.”

KU’s 12th-year coach gave his team a day off from practice but did speak to the Jayhawks at various junctures.

“I don’t think teams can become teams, certainly we can’t, until you go through some stuff,” Self said. “I told our guys today, ‘Surely that was enough to go through.’ I am real excited about what we have moving forward, trying to figure this out to get us to the point we really can compete on a national level. I know we will.”

He told the players a story about the 2006-07 Jayhawks who won the Big 12 and reached the Elite Eight in a 33-5 season.

“We were really good. We had Julian (Wright), Brandon (Rush), Mario (Chalmers), Sherron (Collins), Shady (Darrell Arthur), Sasha (Kaun) and Darnell (Jackson), Cole (Aldrich) wasn’t here yet,” Self recalled.

“Oral Roberts comes in here (Allen Fieldhouse) and beats us. We beat Florida and followed that up losing at DePaul (to) a DePaul team that wasn’t very good. I asked the guys today, ‘What would you rather have happen? One really bad day or two really bad days?’ We’ve just got to learn from this, build off it and get better.

“The loss (to Kentucky) shouldn’t bother us as much as how we played should bother us. Last night, Kentucky would have beat anybody in the country, anybody. The other thing is they had 16 more practice days than us. They went to the Bahamas (in August) and got 10 days (of practice) and played six games against really good teams over there. They were more together. Maybe if we had two and a half more weeks we’d definitely put up a better game. I’m not putting up any bold predictions,” Self stressed, definitely not saying KU would have defeated the No. 1-rated Wildcats under any conditions.

Self said John Calipari’s team of nine McDonald’s All-Americans and NBA prospect Willie Cauley-Stein is for real.

“We ran crap offense and we got exactly what we deserved, but I will say they had a lot to do with it. We may have played a team or two over the years that may have a chance to be as good a team, but we’ve never played a team with that many good players. We played against 10 NBA guys,” Self said.

It was reminiscent of UK’s star-studded 2011-12 team that beat KU, 75-65, in the Champions Classic and again, 67-59, in the national title game.

“That was a loaded (UK) team. We had them to two possessions late after a really crappy start (in title game),” Self said. “I’m not going to say I hope we get a chance to play again, because a lot depends where we are seeded and the bracket. I do hope there’s an opportunity for us to have a chance to see how much we’ve improved at some point in time.”

After taking a short nap, Self broke down tape of Tuesday’s contest in which KU scored just 40 points off school-record low 19.6 percent shooting.

“In a lot of ways I don’t think we were quite as bad as I thought,” Self said. “We missed some shots, missed free throws (KU was 15 of 27 at line). You’d think we’d shoot a better percentage, but we didn’t get very many good looks. We didn’t play smart. We didn’t run our stuff. We were disorganized 100 percent of the time it looked to me out there.”

On the bright side, “we didn’t give up anything in transition,” Self said. “We didn’t give up any lobs, which is a big point of their offense. Little did we know we could be so inept offensively.”

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