Mass Street players bring common origins, distinct experiences to The Basketball Tournament

By Henry Greenstein     Jun 30, 2023

article image Nick Krug; Chance Parker
Tyshawn Taylor, shown on the left after a 2012 game against Kansas State and on the right during a June Kansas men's basketball scrimmage, is one of the most experienced members of the Mass Street TBT team.

Make no mistake: Mass Street’s Kansas alumni team is taking The Basketball Tournament seriously.

Each player may have his own reason for participating, Keith Langford said Friday. In his case, this summer’s tournament serves as his farewell to professional basketball following a distinguished overseas career.

Tyshawn Taylor, for his part, has played in numerous iterations of TBT and said he’s found again and again that coming in unprepared simply doesn’t work. This team will put in hours of practice, research its opposition, jell as a unit and draw some plays from Bill Self’s playbook — as Taylor said head coach Marcus Morris already has.

Those are just the first steps on the winding path toward snagging TBT’s million-dollar prize in August.

“I didn’t get that walk-off moment,” Langford told reporters on Zoom, “and I wasn’t able to finish my career the way I wanted to due to the Achilles injury (a tendinopathy that derailed his final years playing in Europe). But to be able to have this full-circle moment, playing with Kansas, especially when the end of my Kansas career did not end well, so to be able to close my career and then close it wearing a form of a KU jersey -“

“We’ll make it blue and red for sure,” Taylor interjected.

“At least that,” Langford continued. “So for me to have that, I couldn’t have (written) this any better.”

Taylor is the TBT veteran on Mass Street, which among its roster of KU luminaries features many first-time participants. He’s played for everyone from The Jabroni Project to Team FOE to the ill-fated KU predecessor Self Made to Oklahoma State alumni group Stillwater Stars. Sometimes, he says, participants show up expecting TBT to be as laid-back as a pickup game.

“We’ve showed up a day before and just played, and it didn’t work out,” he said. “We’ve practiced days before, and we’ve made big runs.”

He adds that while all the players originate from KU — the roster also includes Devon Dotson, Marcus Garrett, Dedric Lawson, Mario Little, Thomas Robinson, Wayne Selden, Jamari Traylor and LaGerald Vick so far — few of them have actually played with each other. TBT’s field, meanwhile, still contains teams from its inaugural tournament nine years ago.

“I saw there was a team from the Drew League (L.A. Cheaters) that’s played together for years, and in order to negate that, the preparation and practice and stuff like that is important as well,” Langford said. “It represents a unique challenge for me, but I’m definitely looking forward to it.”

Another hurdle to clear: Mass Street’s players are not all coming in on even footing. Dotson and Garrett are current NBA G League players and many others are fresh off seasons played abroad. Langford and Taylor are not.

“We understand that we haven’t been playing,” Taylor said. “We’re not coming off of seasons, we’re not in the best shape we’ve ever been in, we’re not playing with the biggest chips on our shoulder like we would have been four or five years ago.”

They have less than three weeks to coalesce before their first matchup. Mass Street is a No. 1 seed and will face eighth-seeded We Are D3, another returning team, in its opening game on July 19 in Wichita. A win could set up a showdown with Missouri alumni team Show Me Squad. That rivalry still burns bright for the KU grads, even more than a decade later — as Langford said, “It really epitomized the essence of college basketball.”

article imageJournal-World file photo; Nick Krug

Keith Langford, shown during a 2005 game against Texas Tech and this June’s Rock Chalk Roundball Classic, will be making his farewell to pro basketball in The Basketball Tournament.

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Written By Henry Greenstein

Henry is the sports editor at the Lawrence Journal-World and KUsports.com, and serves as the KU beat writer while managing day-to-day sports coverage. He previously worked as a sports reporter at The Bakersfield Californian and is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis (B.A., Linguistics) and Arizona State University (M.A., Sports Journalism). Though a native of Los Angeles, he has frequently been told he does not give off "California vibes," whatever that means.