Early in the season, fifth-year Kansas senior center Landen Lucas didn’t even rebound well, a sure sign he was not anywhere close to himself. I knew that once he broke out of his slump and put a little distance on it he would be honest about what exactly was dogging him. Sure enough, Lucas delivered Monday afternoon.
Basically, Lucas worked all summer on shoring up his weaknesses, expanding his offensive repertoire in hopes of becoming a more central focus of the offense. In so doing, all while battling a downplayed foot injury, Lucas stopped excelling in the areas that made him so valuable as a junior, namely defense and rebounding.
“It gets kind of frustrating when you go throughout the summer with the goal of all these new things I’m adding to my game and stuff and then you get into the season and all the sudden you find yourself, ‘OK, really what I do best has nothing to do with that.’ What I do well is exactly what this team could use,” Lucas said. “You find that if you start focusing on those things (defense and rebounding), other things start coming, and who knows, maybe the more I focus on those other things, the things I worked on this summer will start to show too.”
Said Kansas coach Bill Self: “It wasn’t that he can’t do things, it’s just that there are some things that he’s better at than others and players should always play to their strengths and he wasn’t probably doing that like he could. I thought he was great against TCU and I thought he was great on the glass against UNLV as well. Yeah, he’s definitely on his way back.”
In the past four games, Lucas has averaged 24.3 minutes, 9.8 points and 11 rebounds. He’s coming off a 15-point, 17-rebound game against TCU.
Lucas said his improved play didn’t arrive as quickly as his improved approach. There was a lag, he said, between the time he decided to get back to focusing on his strengths and when his play improved.
“I think it started off that way and I might have just been trying to do too much and then I figured it out pretty quickly and tried to make the adjustment and in my head I really felt like I was playing the right way,” he said. “It just wasn’t translating. To the outside, to the public, to anyone who really isn’t close to me, it might have looked like it continued for a while. I had the right mindset. There are a lot of things that come into play with that, whether it be foul trouble, small injuries, just the way the ball was bouncing. There were a lot of things. I think I had the right mindset. I just had to stick with it. It’s finally kind of come around.”
Lucas’ foot injury kept him in a boot for most of the non-conference season, but the injury was downplayed. That’s typical in sports, in part to keep opponents in the dark, in part to try to make the athlete convince himself he’s not in as much pain as his mind is telling him. It must be a rotten feeling for athletes playing through pain and hiding it to have to take criticism for poor play.
“It’s tough but it’s one of those things where everybody goes through it,” Lucas said. “There are a lot of teams that handle it the same way and you kind of have to figure it out. Coach teaches us to be men about things and handle business and that’s what we kind of have as our mindset. We don’t let small things like that get to us too much. So while it might be a factor in things, we want to make sure it’s as small a factor as possible, and just work through it and move on. You’ll heal eventually. That was my mindset the whole time, just kind of working through it and making sure I was getting better each day and each practice. I think I did that pretty well.”
