The college basketball season hasn’t even started yet and already Kansas University junior Drew Gooden is in his coach’s doghouse.
“I expect if the Yankees beat Oakland tonight,” KU coach Roy Williams quipped Thursday during the team’s annual preseason media gathering, “I’m going to go find him tomorrow like he found me today.”
It seems Gooden, KU’s 6-foot-10, 230-pound forward from Richmond, Calif., has been talking trash on Williams about the major league baseball playoffs.
He even made a late-night phone call to his coach after Gooden’s favorite team (the Oakland Athletics) defeated Williams’ favorite team (the New York Yankees), 5-3, in the first game of their best-of-five divisional series Wednesday night in New York.
“I don’t think they’re going to sweep the Yankees,” Gooden said with a laugh. “But me and coach even had this talk today. Coach said, ‘I think the A’s are going to get them again.’ If coach Williams said that he’s a coach, he knows his game.
“So I think we’re going to pull out another one.”
Gooden certainly was at ease while being bombarded with questions during KU’s Media Day. As it turns out, he’s as comfortable bathing in the warm glow of the spotlight as he is throwing down monster dunks in Allen Fieldhouse.
The most popular question asked of the forward was an oldie but goodie are you turning pro after the season?
“Have I been asked? He just asked me if I’ve been asked,” Gooden quipped, before turning serious for a moment. “I talked to coach and that’s something that me and him are going to get together with my family at the end of the season and come up with another choice. It’s something I don’t want to think about during the season.
“Hopefully I’ll have a good season and things will work out fine.”
It wouldn’t be the first time Gooden has made a decision about whether to leave early for the NBA, a la Paul Pierce. Last summer after his sophomore season, Gooden contemplated jumping ship before deciding to return to KU.
Popular opinion believes Gooden’s junior season will be his last on Mount Oread.
“You can’t say that, though,” Gooden said. “I think year by year I’m getting better. But what I did last year, the stats I put up, especially in the Kansas program, those stats were good enough to go. But that’s not what I’m looking at. I’m looking at me as a person and trying to improve as the years go by.
“If it happens, it happens.”
Last season, Gooden had team-highs for average points a game (15.8) and rebounds a game (8.4). However, he feels former teammate Eric Chenowith might have slowed the Jayhawks down last season.
“I’m going to be honest, it kind of gives us room to operate outside now (without Chenowith),” Gooden said. “Nothing bad against Eric, he was my teammate for two years, but Eric was Eric. This just gives us a little bit more room to work.
“That was tough for Eric because we did a lot of running last year, playing a lot of up-and-down ball and it was hard for him to get the feel for that. Me and Nick, we can run.”
Gooden feels there isn’t a better pair of post players in the country than he and Nick Collison, a 6-9, 250-pound junior forward from Iowa Falls, Iowa. He thinks KU can play a fast tempo transition game as well as work the high-low halfcout offense this season.
And he knows Williams expects a lot out of him.
“I think he looks forward to me scoring more, rebounding more, passing the ball more, being a leader out there,” Gooden said. “He didn’t ask this my freshman year or my sophomore year. This is the first year he’s really asked me to step up and do that. It’s not everything, but it’s a whole lot for our team.”
That shouldn’t be a problem for Gooden, who impressed Michael Jordan while playing pick-up basketball at the NBA great’s youth basketball camp last July in Santa Barbara, Calif.
