I’ve been asking around for months now and nobody can come up with an answer.
Bill Self, as you know, has zero starters back from the NCAA championship team, and no one can remember the last time a Kansas University men’s basketball coach faced that situation.
On the flip side, there’s KU’s women’s basketball program. Whereas Self has so many new faces it may be January before fans sort them all out, Bonnie Henrickson has just one.
Not that Henrickson planned it that way. She had hoped to have three, but one – Ashley Ellis, a 6-foot-3 center from Antioch, Calif. – didn’t qualify for a scholarship, and the other : well, you know all about Angel Goodrich’s season-ending knee injury.
The lone new face on the KU women’s basketball roster is Aishah Sutherland, a 6-2 freshman from Perris, Calif., who showed some athleticism in the Jayhawks’ first exhibition game against a badly outwomanned Fort Hays State team.
However, Sutherland never left the bench during Sunday’s exhibition finale against Washburn, meaning Henrickson does not consider her ready for prime-time : at least not yet.
Usually it takes time for freshmen to learn how to play defense and it’s clear Henrickson’s fifth edition – composed almost entirely of the same players she had last year – will have to rely on a buzzsaw attack when opponents have the ball.
Henrickson had hoped the addition of Goodrich would give the Jayhawks the quality point guard she desperately needed to upgrade an undernourished offense. Henrickson has point-makers, but not playmakers who can manufacture shots in a game defined by a 30-second shot clock.
Halfcourt offense doesn’t appear to be a strength, so Henrickson is emphasizing defense, realizing the only way to upgrade the offense, the only way to produce more points is to earn transition baskets off turnovers.
That strategy worked Sunday with the Jayhawks harassing Washburn, a good NCAA Div. II team, into 23 turnovers.
“I love their defense,” Washburn coach Ron McHenry said. “Kansas has some nice long athletes, and they play hard.”
But Div. II is still Div. II, leaving us to wonder if Henrickson’s players can excel at defense on a consistent basis at the higher level? This is, after all, virtually the same cast that finished 4-12 in conference standings last season.
An intangible that could come into play is experience. No coach can improve on a player’s level of competence. No coach can turn a poor shooter into a good shooter. But experience can help in some areas.
Kansas, for example, was the most turnover-prone team in the league last year, and it’s not unrealistic to think maturity will go a long way toward cutting down on the raft of giveaways.
If juniors Danielle McCray and Sade Morris, the only KU players with the potential to score in double figures night in and night out, make the same progress they made between their freshman and sophomore seasons, KU’s cup could be half-full instead of half-empty.
By the time the new year starts, we should know if Henrickson’s familiar faces have stepped it up a notch, or are merely the same old suspects.
