TOPEKA — The availability of Charleston transfer Christian Reeves will change the identity of the Kansas men’s basketball team in one important way, to the point that head coach Bill Self called it “one of the biggest keys we have.”
“When he gets healthy, God, we’ll go from being a small team to one of the biggest teams around,” Self said on Monday at the Topeka Jayhawk Club’s Otto Schnellbacher Classic.
After playing through a shoulder injury as a redshirt junior with the Cougars — and still averaging 11.1 points and 7.8 rebounds per game in just 21.4 minutes — the 7-foot-2, 255-pound center had surgery on his labrum, as the Journal-World reported in early May.
As long as he’s recovering, fellow 7-footer Paul Mbiya will be KU’s only true center with any sort of experience during summer workouts. And while Reeves is set to be out of a sling on Thursday, Self said, it will be some time before he returns to full action.
“He’ll start doing a lot more range of motion and rehab,” Self said. “But the reality of it is, it’s not going to be contact with him probably until the first of October, something like that. So even though he can do all non-contact, he can do five-on-zero, he can do all the shooting stuff, but he won’t be able to get hit in this area until probably, you know, early, mid-October.”
That means that the center spot is “there for Paul to take, at least initially,” Self said. That would mean a big jump after the Congolese sophomore averaged just 5.0 minutes per game in 21 appearances as a freshman, with his most significant action coming in NCAA Tournament matchups against Cal Baptist (eight points, three rebounds and a block) and St. John’s (four points, six rebounds and a block).
Of course, Mbiya isn’t the sole non-Reeves option for a hypothetical 2026-27 KU men’s basketball option. Self acknowledged the possibility of small ball.
That would entail one of the Jayhawks’ 6-foot-9 forwards, Utah transfer Keanu Dawes or freshman Davion Adkins, playing center, potentially with top-ranked freshman Tyran Stokes sliding to power forward. Regardless of the post situation, KU may already be rather small in the backcourt if it chooses to start both 6-foot-2 Taylen Kinney and 6-foot-1 Leroy Blyden. Opting for Dawes in the post could compound that.
“We could play small, but the reality of it is, I’d rather not do that,” Self said.
Reeves started his career with two years at Duke, the second cut short by injury, and one as a rotational piece at Clemson before making the move to Charleston, then picking the Jayhawks in the transfer portal.
Mbiya could potentially have left KU in that same portal window. Multiple reports early in the spring initially suggested he planned to do so. But as the deadline to actually enter the portal approached, he announced that he would stay at KU after all.
He ended up being one of just two scholarship Jayhawks, along with fellow underclassman Kohl Rosario, to return from the 2025-26 team that lost in the second-round of the NCAA Tournament.
“It’s a different world and you guys probably don’t see it the same way, but when you make a decision to go in on Tyran, that automatically eliminates you retaining some other guys,” Self said. “And they can obviously make (significantly) more money somewhere else.
“So keeping Paul and Kohl, first of all, I still think (Kohl) should be an NBA guy. And I think Paul, if he gets the opportunity, which he will, I think he can do some things that we haven’t seen from a production standpoint.”
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