STILLWATER, Okla. — Kansas coach Bill Self has spoken at length this season — even at his team’s happiest moments, like after KU beat No. 1 Arizona on Feb. 9 — about how he believes his team can reach another level of play when it has all its pieces firmly in place.
The way Wednesday night’s victory at Oklahoma State went down undoubtedly has KU fans wondering exactly when that might be, and whether the Jayhawks will ever truly be whole, because it featured an all-too-familiar early exit for guard Darryn Peterson.
Prior to Wednesday, 18 days had passed since Peterson’s last known in-game cramping episode, when he scored 18 points in the first half of a marquee duel with fellow fabulous freshman AJ Dybantsa before exiting for good with 16:46 to go. The rest of the Jayhawks then let a 21-point lead dwindle to four before managing to win by eight.
The intervening weeks created the impression that Peterson had shaken off the cramping issues, those that had limited his minutes since December, once and for all. He played 35 minutes and hit a pair of game-deciding 3-pointers in the final moments of KU’s win over Texas Tech on Feb. 2, then led all Jayhawks with 34 minutes in a home victory over Utah five days later.
Peterson missed KU’s upset win over Arizona on Feb. 9 due to flu-like symptoms and, after a round of fresh criticism from national media, received an impassioned defense from Self in a midweek press conference several days later. The 23rd-year head coach said his star freshman had merely encountered a run of bad luck with his hamstring injury, cramps, rolled ankle and illness, and defended him against persistent (and quite apparently false) narratives about “load management” that had been spreading on social media.
But Self struck a new tone postgame, one of disappointment, on Wednesday when Peterson reprised essentially exactly what had taken place against BYU on Jan. 31 — but five games and 18 precious days later.
The guard dazzled with 20 early points, helping KU go ahead by as many as 23. Then he exited with 17:22 remaining after hitting one last 3-pointer. He gestured to Self following the shot, and the head coach promptly sent another player to the scorer’s table, although Self said afterward that Peterson was already going to come out beforehand.
“And then he makes the 3 and then he said ‘Get me,'” Self recalled. “I didn’t know that he’d be done, but obviously he was cramping.”
The main difference in game flow on Wednesday as opposed to on Jan. 31 was that KU had already lost more than half of its advantage before Peterson’s departure — his shot made it a 13-point game after OSU had cut it to 10 — but in any case the remaining Jayhawks pieced together an undistinguished second half without him on their way to an 81-69 victory over the Cowboys.
Self said at one point on Wednesday that he felt KU was still making progress with Peterson’s cramping. But he also said that he had previously thought the Jayhawks had moved past the issue and in fact they clearly had not.
“I didn’t anticipate that tonight at all,” Self said. “I thought he was good to go. But obviously we only got 18 minutes out of him. That’s disappointing because he could have had a really big night.”
Self said that his team is “not unaccustomed” to playing without Peterson. Like all examples of litotes, that’s an understatement. Peterson has missed 12 of KU’s 26 games and has been unable to finish the vast majority of the remaining 14.
Senior forward Tre White said postgame that Peterson “did a good job the first half of putting us in a good space to keep it going.”
“Even when the other team went on a couple runs, we were up enough to where we (could) kind of take that impact and then just try to play hard in the second half, finish the game,” White added.
Self, however, seemed to be reckoning after the events of Wednesday with the idea that the Jayhawks could lose Peterson at a time when they didn’t have a double-digit cushion on which to fall back — perhaps even with elimination at stake.
“You get into the NCAA Tournament, you’re playing a team just as good as you and you need to have all your best players available, so to speak,” Self said. “Yeah, all it takes is for one day like that to derail not only a game, but a season.”
Such a fateful day could now be a mere month away, as the first round of the tournament begins on March 19. The time remaining for KU to both get Peterson’s cramps under control and get better at playing around him when he is actually on the floor is dwindling.
