As befits what was generally a sub-par regular season for the Kansas men’s basketball team, the 2024-25 campaign featured its fair share of moments that KU fans would like to forget and probably can’t.
A few likely come to mind immediately — West Virginia guard Javon Small catching Flory Bidunga leaping to draw a foul, then making a game-winning free throw; every time KU left Jalen Celestine open beyond the arc as it blew a school-record 21-point lead at Baylor; and basically everything that happened in the final 11 minutes and 30 seconds of the double-overtime home heartbreaker against Houston.
That’s not to say the year was devoid of actually positive season-defining plays, by any stretch. The teamwide effort to set up KJ Adams’ alley-oop dunk in the Jayhawks’ victory over Iowa State makes for a highlight KU fans will likely replay for years to come. Further back, the Jayhawks’ final two defensive stops in a victory over now-elite Duke stand out, as does Flory Bidunga’s one-man fast break on the road at UCF.
This article isn’t for those sorts of moments, though; it’s for the ones, good and bad, that were just as important but might have faded to the background over the course of the longest Big 12 schedule in league history. Here are five of those.
Nov. 8: Zeke Mayo’s game-tying floater against North Carolina
Before KU actually followed through on blowing a historically large lead on the road at Baylor, it nearly did so at home in the second game of the season. In what nearly mirrored the 2022 national title game, the Jayhawks led UNC by 20 points in the first half and 11 midway through the second before conceding a 14-2 run.
KU even trailed by two possessions with three and a half minutes to go, but a big reason why the Jayhawks emerged victorious was the clutch play of the Lawrence native Mayo.
Mayo, who wasn’t even starting at this point in the season (a bit of rotation design that didn’t last long), endeared himself to the hometown fans in short order. His 21-point performance against the Tar Heels included a pair of clutch free throws to tie the game once, and then, to do so again, he hit one of the toughest contested shots of KU’s season.
With less than two minutes remaining, he caught the ball at the left elbow, muscled his way into the paint against UNC’s star guard RJ Davis, tried and failed to get Davis to bite on a fake and then tossed the ball up anyway at an odd angle. The shot stalled on the back of the rim and rolled around before dropping in to tie the game. (Mayo later said he thought he got fouled on the way up.) Hunter Dickinson sank a go-ahead layup soon after and UNC didn’t score again.
Mayo later demonstrated a bit of a propensity for hitting these floaters in clutch moments. He had another one rattle home to give KU the lead late against Duke.
Nov. 26: Rylan Griffen makes two big plays late against Duke after a horrific one prior to halftime
Some of the biggest plays of that Duke game, though, came from the Alabama transfer Griffen, which was surprising given how dramatic a gaffe he made prior to halftime.
With the shot clock off in the waning moments of the first half, Griffen pulled up for a transition 3 and missed badly, allowing the Blue Devils’ Tyrese Proctor to hit a 3 of his own at the other end that cut KU’s lead to two. KU coach Bill Self called it “awful.”
He redeemed himself and more after a key entrance into the game with less than seven minutes remaining. Griffen drained a left-wing 3-pointer off an acrobatic assist from Dajuan Harris Jr. to put KU ahead 68-67, then, after grabbing an offensive rebound, extended that margin with a three-point play through a blocking foul by Proctor.
The icing on the cake was Griffen’s pair of free throws to make it a three-point game late after a late turnover by Duke’s Kon Knueppel, forcing Knueppel to settle for a deep 3 at the buzzer, which he missed.
“I was just trying to do what I could to win the game,” Griffen said. “It was winning time … I wouldn’t really say it was a mindset change, but it was more like an intensity change. I had to ramp it up because the game was about to end. I didn’t want to lose. Like I said, I owed them for earlier in the first half.”
Missouri’s Mark Mitchell celebrates a basket during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game against Kansas Sunday, Dec. 8, 2024, in Columbia, Mo. Missouri won 76-67.
Dec. 8: Mark Mitchell makes corner 3 after KU had cut lead to two points
The Jayhawks were pretty exceptional at playing from behind all season long, even if it didn’t always result in comeback wins like against Arizona State and TCU in January.
In its second and third losses of the year, KU stormed back from massive deficits only to suffer heartbreak in the final moments.
In the league opener against West Virginia, it came down to Small’s last-second trip to the free-throw line. In the Border Showdown against Missouri, one Kansas City, Kansas, native, Tamar Bates, had torched the Jayhawks all day, but it was the other, Mark Mitchell, who made the play that consigned KU to defeat.
After playing a bafflingly terrible first half that included 15 turnovers, the Jayhawks, at the time still ranked No. 1 in the nation, fell behind by as many as 24 points midway through the second to a Missouri team that had only just beaten its first power-conference team in over a year (though it later turned out to be a middle-tier competitor in a strong SEC).
“When you play away from home, you can’t afford to dig yourself into a hole like that because the comeback almost has to be flawless,” Self said after the game.
KU’s was not. The Jayhawks used 15-0 and 9-1 runs to get back within striking distance, and the Columbia, Missouri, native Harris drew contact with Mitchell for a three-point play that made it a two-point game with 2:20 to go, the closest KU had been since the score was 5-4.
On the Tigers’ next trip down, though, an ill-fated attempt by Dickinson and David Coit to double-team Anthony Robinson II left Mitchell wide open in the left corner. Bates found him and he made his fifth 3-pointer of the year after opening 4-for-19 from deep in nearly nine full games. The Jayhawks only made one field goal of their own the rest of the way and lost 76-67 as Missouri reasserted its status as a viable rival in men’s basketball.
Jan. 15: Down six points, KU gives up offensive rebound leading to dagger 3 by Tamin Lipsey
That wasn’t the only deflating late-game 3 the Jayhawks gave up this season. KU’s battle with ISU at Hilton Coliseum followed a bit of a different format, given that the Jayhawks were able to hang around, never too far behind the higher-ranked Cyclones, and crept closer and closer without making up too much ground in any one stretch.
KU, playing without the recently injured Adams, was down five points when both Mayo and Griffen missed second-chance 3s that could have cut the deficit to two with just over five minutes remaining. Instead, Demarion Watson made one of two free throws, Storr was off the mark on another 3 and then, with Joshua Jefferson at the line, Rylan Griffen lost control of a defensive rebound to Dishon Jackson, who grabbed it off the baseline right in front of Dickinson.
Jackson worked the ball back out to guard Keshon Gilbert, who found an uncovered Tamin Lipsey for 3 to make it a nine-point game and take the wind out of KU’s sails.
The hustle play by the Cyclones exemplified a night on which Self said he admired ISU’s ability to get 75% of all 50/50 balls and that his team own displayed sufficient effort but insufficient competitiveness
Kansas forward KJ Adams Jr. (24) knocks the ball away from UCF guard Keyshawn Hall (4) during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game, Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025, in Lawrence. Kansas won 91-87.
Jan. 28: Back from injury, KJ Adams enters game late and plays key defense against red-hot Keyshawn Hall to seal victory
Adams’ return from a dislocated shoulder after just three games came as a surprise to just about everyone — even if Self had suggested on a couple occasions that Adams’ toughness might allow him to come back from the injury sooner than most players.
What Self didn’t count on was that Harris would be out — for the first time in his career — in Adams’ first game back. While Adams wasn’t on a minutes restriction, he came off the bench and didn’t have much of a rhythm at all on offense.
Defense, though, has inevitably been his primary source of value to the Jayhawks, and they needed him badly on this occasion.
Whereas KU had obliterated UCF 99-48 in the two teams’ first meeting, resulting in the biggest road victory by margin in Big 12 history, the Knights went blow for blow with the Harris-less Jayhawks three weeks later. Forward Keyshawn Hall, who had been a cold 4-for-17 in the initial matchup, was nearly unstoppable in the rematch. He had scored eight points in under four minutes and was about to get a ninth at the stripe when Self decided to put Adams back into the game with 1:55 to go.
At that point, Hall made it 34 points on the night in an 84-84 game; he did not score again in the final two minutes.
On one possession, Adams blanketed Hall just outside the paint and forced him to airball a baseline jumper. On another, after Adams had missed from close range and the Knights got out in transition down one point with 10 seconds to go, he got in front of Hall, stood his ground as Hall barreled into the paint and forced a turnover.
Adams secured the ball and made two key free throws in what became a 91-87 victory.
“He’s just got so much heart, plays with so much aggression, so much passion,” Mayo said after the game. “He brings an energy to our team that it’s hard to find in somebody else.”
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Sarah Buchanan/Special to the Journal-World
AP Photo/L.G. Patterson
AP Photo/Charlie Riedel