The minimal contributions of the Kansas men’s basketball bench this season have already been well documented. KU ranked 335th in the nation in bench scoring as of Thursday morning, as it has gotten less than 13 points per game from its reserves this year, and if that number seems somehow high it’s because the Jayhawks have only averaged 8.4 since beginning Big 12 Conference play.
While KU coach Bill Self has frequently acknowledged these struggles as a concern, he hasn’t necessarily sounded the alarm.
Asked on Monday about the two total points the bench produced in an overtime loss to Kansas State, he said, “Yeah, it puts pressure on starters, but (with) the starters playing the majority of the minutes, they should score the majority of the points. The bench doesn’t have a chance to score a lot of points — they don’t play a lot.”
Indeed, KU has also consistently played its starters for more minutes than most of the country does. And on his “Hawk Talk” radio show Wednesday, Self suggested that he could do more to help his top players maximize those minutes.
“I actually think that I can do a better job, a lot better job than what I’ve done, in letting the starters know where the finish line actually is,” he said.
He continued by creating an analogy with a traditional work shift: If your boss tells you to come in at 8 a.m. without telling you when you’re going to be able to leave, it might be harder for you to work hard throughout the day, as opposed to knowing you’re going home at 5 p.m.
“I think sometimes guys, when they don’t know where the finish line is, may say ‘God dang, yeah, I know I’m supposed to go to the offensive glass every time — but God, I also don’t know when I’m coming out,'” Self said.
By more clearly delineating the lengths of players’ shifts in the rotation, in other words, he might improve their productivity throughout. That could be particularly crucial for a team that, in describing the loss at Kansas State as one in which “We were tired when the game started,” Self said needs “to be turned up all the time.”
“I think that when we have been, we’ve been good,” Self said, “but when we haven’t been we can certainly — from an execution, from a mental-mistake standpoint, from a lot of those things — we can certainly make some mistakes that (put) us in harm’s way.”
Self had mentioned in the midst of KU’s latest Saturday-Monday turnaround (from Houston to Kansas State) that he planned to give his team two days off practice following Monday’s game. On “Hawk Talk,” he confirmed he had done just that.
That’s a little more rest than the Jayhawks got after the West Virginia/Cincinnati stretch last month, when starters got two days off but reserves practiced on the second day.
“Our energy level on Saturday and Monday (was) night and day,” he said, “and hopefully from Monday to Saturday will also be night and day as well.”
Then they have another quick turnaround before they play Texas Tech in Lubbock next Monday.
Players like Dajuan Harris Jr. and Johnny Furphy aren’t physically built to play so many minutes, though even the more durable KJ Adams is playing too many, Self said.
Harris was on the court for 42 minutes Monday and put together one of his best games of the season with 15 points and eight assists, in what went down as just the second time in his career that KU lost with Harris scoring double-digit points.
Harris has played the most of any Jayhawk this season. As Self noted recently, when Harris is out of the game KU doesn’t really play with a point guard at all, and “we don’t run a lot of sets because we don’t know them.”
Commercial-free basketball
Any early substitution plans Self may have made Monday were likely altered when the game took a bizarrely long nine minutes to reach its first TV timeout. As he put it, his team was “wasted” by the time it made it to the break.
“(Hunter Dickinson) was asking to come out with 15 minutes left, and we didn’t get a stoppage until 10:58,” he said.
Generally speaking, these timeouts come at the first dead ball after each of the 16-, 12-, eight- and four-minute marks.
Self said he remembered something similar happening during the second half of an NCAA Tournament game when he was the coach at Tulsa.
“It went from the 12-minute timeout to three minutes and 15 seconds,” he said. “And it won us the game during that period of time. It won us the game because our opponent was so worn out and in that particular moment we had guys in there that could run all day.”
