Kansas center Christian Reeves declared at Thursday’s media day that he will be ready to play for the Jayhawks in Friday night’s Late Night in the Phog exhibition game.
It’ll be the first time in a long time that Reeves takes to the court without the burden of a right shoulder injury. The 7-foot-2 fifth-year center played hurt all of last year at the College of Charleston, underwent surgery in the spring and only in the last couple weeks has gotten back to full strength.
“I think that he’s been good to go for about three weeks,” head coach Bill Self said. “I think there’s still some hesitancy playing as aggressive. If you can imagine having a torn tendon in your right arm, where every time you do this as a big guy” — he lifted his right hand above his head — “you’re scared if you get hit like that it’s going to cause pain or even cause it to retear or whatever, well, he’s past the point now where he can let it go.
“I actually think a big key to him having success early is having the confidence to let it go and not think twice.”
Reeves’ own success, in turn, is a big key to the Jayhawks’ as a team. Self said shortly after acquiring the veteran center that getting him healthy would turn KU “from being a small team to one of the biggest teams around.”
Now that he’s back, he’ll compete with promising returner Paul Mbiya for minutes. And while Self, especially since Tre White returned to KU, has contemplated the potential merits of a small-ball lineup with Keanu Dawes at center and White and Tyran Stokes making up the rest of the frontcourt, he said on Thursday that the Jayhawks haven’t practiced it yet and that it may be more of a periodic situational choice: “When you say practice playing small, I would like to play a way that I know that we can play man-to-man against the teams we have coming up. Can you play small against Flory (Bidunga, now at Louisville)? Can you play small against Duke? Can you play small against Kentucky? … The answer is maybe in short spurts.”
That will mean plenty of time on the court for Mbiya, who averaged 5.0 minutes per game in his first season with the Jayhawks, and for Reeves, who even last year in his most productive of four collegiate seasons played just 21.4 minutes per game.
He certainly made the most of them, accumulating 11.1 points and 7.8 rebounds per game and improving as the year went on, even as he dealt with the shoulder issue.
“It was definitely difficult,” Reeves said. “I actually kind of tweaked it again kind of like in the middle of the season, or earlier on in the season, so just had to figure out how to fight through it and play.”
It wasn’t always clear that he was going to need surgery, but eventually that emerged as the consensus option for how he would proceed after the season. But then he wanted to make sure he had a new school picked before he went under the knife.
“Coach (Chris) Mack ended up going to USF last year, so that kind of changed things a little bit,” Reeves said. “He was trying to recruit me back to Charleston, and then to USF with him, but I got in the portal and I just knew I wanted to look at all my options, and I feel like this is the best place for me to be this year.”
Reeves had surgery in May in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. In the months since, he very gradually worked his way back into action — “It was definitely tough. I mean, I kind of had to learn how to shoot a basketball again almost in a sense. I was kind of limited in my range of motion, and how high I could raise my arm and things like that” — before his official return in time for KU’s annual conditioning boot camp in September.
“I think that was a pretty cool thing, just to be able to go through that with the guys and obviously challenge myself,” Reeves added. “I think that was a good place for me to start coming back.”
He’s now had about five weeks’ worth of contact, including full-court contact for the past four.
When Reeves is at his best, he said, his skill set includes “running the court well, finishing around the rim, blocking shots, setting screens and just being big around the rim, and rebounding.”
“He’s really good,” Mbiya said. “(Playing) against 7-foot-1 every day in practice is very good for me. I think it’s helpful for him and for me too.”
While he’s never been a consistent starter, Reeves is still one of the more experienced Jayhawks. He’s been around the block, with stints at Duke and Clemson before making the move to Charleston.
“I think just the maturity that I’ve kind of gained throughout the years, I think it obviously means a lot to be in a program like this,” he said. “You know, I started off at Duke and I didn’t know that this would be where I ended up at.”
As for Self, he’s been particularly impressed by Reeves’ communication abilities — a particularly relevant attribute in a center who can see more of the court than anyone else — which he compared to those of Landen Lucas: “He’s by far the best talker we have,” Self said.
“Is he ready to do some things offensively and stuff like that that I think he’ll be ready to do in a month? Maybe not,” Self said. “But he’s plenty ready to be out there and contribute, but not at the level that I think he will a month from now.”
In the meantime, Reeves acknowledged that he’s looking forward to KU’s exhibition game against Duke, even if he’s trying to take it one game at a time between now and then (Pitt State on Friday, Louisville on Wednesday). Duke’s roster has changed dramatically, but it still features Reeves’ former middle school, high school and college teammate Caleb Foster.
