There was a time near the conclusion of the 2023-24 season when, as Kansas coach Bill Self put it, “That was not a very good team we were putting out there at the end.”
The Jayhawks were thin from the start of the year but at one point were even missing both of their top two scorers, Kevin McCullar Jr. and Hunter Dickinson, in the Big 12 tournament due to injuries.
Looking back, Self said it reminded him of three years earlier, when KU ended its season on a blowout second-round loss after players missed time due to COVID-19.
“I thought last year felt a lot like USC to me,” he said on Monday, “because I didn’t think we were competitive late.”
The expectation after 2020-21, Self recalled, was that KU would bring in a “plethora of guys that was different than what we had”; instead, the Jayhawks retained mostly the same team (plus Remy Martin) and won a national title 12 months later.
KU, the newly minted preseason No. 1 team, will be hoping to bounce back after another Round of 32 loss in a similarly successful fashion in 2024-25 — albeit after taking a different approach to its offseason.
“We needed to improve ourselves physically and athletically, and I think we did,” Self said.
What stands out to him most about this year’s squad, with mere days before Late Night in the Phog and three weeks to the start of the season, is “options.”
“More bodies, more athletes,” he said. “I think we shoot it better — even though there’ll be some days we don’t, but I do think we’re a much better shooting team. I think we’ve helped ourselves athletically for sure. There’s a lot of things that I think potentially we could do well, a lot of things we don’t do very well at all right now, but it is a different-looking team physically than what we’ve had this past year.”
In fact, KU now has so many options in comparison — with 12 healthy scholarship players expected to be available this year, though Self is still weighing potential redshirts — that Self feels it will be to his team’s advantage to play top returnees KJ Adams, Hunter Dickinson and Dajuan Harris Jr. for less than 30 minutes per game.
“I think we’ll be a better team if we can get them all under 30, and that allows for more guys to be contributors and good players to actually play a role in the success of what’s going on more,” Self said.
For example, last year, Self notes, KU didn’t have “ball-handling, playmaking guards” beyond Harris and “desperately needed” them. Now it has Northern Illinois transfer David Coit and soon-to-be-healthy Mississippi State transfer Shakeel Moore.
The Jayhawks lacked sufficient scoring; now they have former Wisconsin star AJ Storr and a Final Four starter at Alabama in Rylan Griffen.
Some of these players may inevitably be taking on somewhat smaller roles than at their previous schools, like Coit and reigning Summit League Player of the Year Zeke Mayo (even if Mayo projects to start and Self has repeatedly called him the team’s best player during the offseason).
“It’s definitely a switch, but if you want to win, it ain’t nothing to put your pride and ego aside,” said Coit, who averaged 20.8 points at Northern Illinois last year. “Because winning’s most important.”
The incoming transfers and freshmen believe they are on the way to forging a winning team.
“There’s definitely challenges just because we all are used to doing other things at other schools, doing it their way,” Griffen said, “but I think it’s great because we’re all friends off the court … so it’s just easier to mesh, and I think with time we’ll be playing with great chemistry, by hopefully when the season starts.”
