Last March, Bill Self sat at the dais after an embarrassing blowout defeat against the Gonzaga Bulldogs that ended the Kansas Jayhawks’ season and admitted an uncomfortable truth: He had been thinking about next season for about a month.
The quote was controversial at the time, widely misconstrued on social media as Self giving up on his team that had limped to the finish line. In reality, Self simply knew what had been obvious for much of the season: His 2023–24 Jayhawks were fatally flawed. They lacked the depth, three-point shooting and overall shotmaking necessary to make the deep March runs KU fans have become accustomed to. And in ’24 college basketball, building the plan to fix a roster via the transfer portal in the spring requires far more forethought than opening the portal the day your season ends.
“When you don’t have as much firepower that maybe you’d had in past years, it certainly showed this year,” Self said in that March news conference.
The firepower accumulated by Self in the weeks after that season-ending defeat was on full display Tuesday night in Las Vegas in No. 1 Kansas’s 75–72 victory over the No. 11 Duke Blue Devils, the type of statement win that validated the Jayhawks’ offseason reloading efforts. Kansas got 32 of its 75 points from its newcomers, and most impressively was able to withstand the final 10:26 without its best player, Hunter Dickinson, who was ejected after appearing to kick Maliq Brown in the head while fighting for a loose ball.
“When you can sub guys in and out and not worry about the talent going down, I think that’s a big up for us,” senior forward KJ Adams, one of the holdovers from last year’s team, said. “You’ve got a bunch of three-point shooters, a lot of athletic guys that we’ve got this year.”
Kansas entered Tuesday with a lot to prove. The Jayhawks stumbled through a grimy win over the middling Michigan State Spartans two weeks ago. Before that, they laid an egg in the second half against North Carolina and nearly gave away a huge first-half lead at home. Kansas was an underdog Tuesday night (at least in the eyes of the sports books), rarefied air for any preseason No. 1 and certainly for a blueblood. This was the clearest possible chance for the Jayhawks to prove their mettle as a serious national title threat, and they delivered in a major way.
The nucleus of this Kansas team is largely the same as it was a year ago: Dickinson carrying the scoring load down low, Dajuan Harris Jr. setting the table and Adams being the glue that keeps everything together. But the Jayhawks’ margin for error in 2023–24 was so slim because of the lack of other options, and when Kevin McCullar Jr. went down with a knee injury, the Jayhawks largely fell apart. That’s the problem Self solved in the portal, with AJ Storr, Rylan Griffen and Zeke Mayo all added to give Kansas more backcourt juice. All three had their moments Tuesday: Storr was essential to the Jayhawks’ first surge to take an early lead, Mayo played a steady floor game en route to 12 points and Griffen delivered two massive buckets after Duke took the lead late.
Dickinson’s ejection could have easily been a major turning point in the game. Last season, it likely would have served as a reminder of the Jayhawks’ limitations. In this one, though, the moment was, in Self’s words, “probably the best thing that [could’ve] happened to us” because it allowed freshman Flory Bidunga to step up and helped the Jayhawks make steps toward establishing their identity.
“This is too early to be a pivotal moment … but this team had no identity yet,” Self said. “I think we could maybe take some pride and say we’ve got more of an identity now because we kind of won ugly down the stretch, which we had to play that way in order to have a chance to win without [Dickinson] out there.”
Things had come slower than many might have liked for Storr and Griffen, the team’s two highest-touted additions from the portal. To be clear, this was no perfect performance from the duo. Self noted postgame he still feels Griffen and Storr are “about a month away” from truly settling into the expectations of playing Kansas basketball. Tuesday’s showing more clearly showed the benefits of KU’s busy offseason—more options late in games, more pieces who can step up in key moments and more players you have to pay attention to at all times when they’re on the floor.
Having survived an early-season stretch that featured three blueblood battles (North Carolina, Michigan State and Duke in the season’s first 23 days), the Jayhawks now get a chance to settle in at No. 1 for a while. The December schedule looks more manageable, although road tests at the Creighton Bluejays and Missouri Tigers won’t be cakewalks. Self should have time to further build up Storr and Griffen, keep incorporating the five-star Bidunga and fine-tune which late-game lineups work best. There’s room for growth, scary given how KU has navigated these early big tests.
Have the Jayhawks racked up the necessary style points of a No. 1 team in the sport? That’s up for debate, and other teams have certainly made their cases for the top spot in a November loaded with top-tier matchups. But Tuesday’s win, and the way it came together, emphatically proved that Self’s Jayhawks have the pieces necessary to make a serious push at his third national title … exactly what Self envisioned as that 2023–24 season came to an unceremonious close.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Kansas’s Statement Win Over Duke Validates Offseason Reloading Efforts.
