The Kansas men’s basketball team opened its 2024 recruiting class with a bang when Flory Bidunga, a 6-foot-9 center ranked as the nation’s best at his position and fifth-best overall, committed to join the Jayhawks next year.
Bidunga, who attends Kokomo High in Kokomo, Indiana, and plays for the Indiana Elite amateur team, announced his decision at halftime of the Under Armour Elite 24 game for top high school prospects in Atlanta Saturday night.
“It was a tough choice for sure, but after all that, I decided to commit to…,” he said on the ESPNU broadcast, pausing dramatically for effect as he pulled a baseball cap out of a bag, “the University of Kansas.”
Bidunga’s choice of school came as a surprise to many basketball prognosticators, as he picked KU over Auburn, Duke and Michigan — of course the Jayhawks have a history of luring top prospects, but the reigning Indiana Gatorade Player of the Year for boys basketball had long been considered a Duke lock. Then came Friday night, when a cadre of Duke writers at recruiting site 247Sports projected him not to the Blue Devils, but to Auburn. As such, the Tigers entered Bidunga’s announcement day as the presumptive favorite until he picked the Jayhawks instead. He had visited Lawrence in May.
Recruiting ratings of 99 on 247Sports and 99.3 on On3 barely begin to tell the story of Bidunga, who grew up a soccer player in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and only started playing basketball four years ago. Even at this early stage of his basketball career, Bidunga is an advanced shot-blocker and a multidimensional scoring threat in the post who can also get down the court at high speeds in transition.
Exactly how he fits in at KU next year depends largely on how Hunter Dickinson performs in the interim, which will in turn determine whether Dickinson is still in Lawrence next year, and so whether a starting spot at center is open for Bidunga. He’ll frequently find himself going up against taller post players at the college ranks but matches a style of player that Bill Self has used effectively in the past.