KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas doesn’t just have a health problem. Kansas has a shooting problem.
On Wednesday night after watching his team lose 72-52 against Cincinnati and shoot 3-of-20 from 3, four days after losing another game by 30 (!) when shooting 3-of-21 from 3, Bill Self compared the way his team is shooting the ball right now to shooting on those tiny rims at the county fair where the ball is almost too big to go in the basket.
“We gotta get a swag back,” Self said. “Jeez. Guys are aiming the ball instead of shooting it.”
The asterisk on this one is that it was played without stars Hunter Dickinson and Kevin McCullar Jr., both injured but expected to play next week in the NCAA Tournament. But this problem runs a lot deeper than just two bad shooting nights with undermanned teams.
Self’s intention this offseason was to build around Dickinson, who was the biggest prize out there in transfer portal land. Self needed to surround the big man with really good defenders — because Dickinson is mediocre there — and then he needed guys who could get Dickinson the ball and spread the floor enough to give him space. He needed a scoring guard who could go get his own and shoot it well enough to keep that spacing.
“When you can’t stretch it,” Self said after this horrid shooting display, “it puts a lot of people around Hunter.”
Self then hit on the point of hope that he’s been trying to sell himself for months: “The bottom line is we haven’t shot the ball well beyond the arc since the second game of the season, but what we have done is run really good offense and score a lot of 2s. A lot. Probably as efficient as anybody in America inside the arc.”
This was true.
On Feb. 3, Kansas beat Houston 78-65 in one of the most impressive offensive performances of the season. The Jayhawks shot 78.1 percent inside the arc that afternoon against a team that came into that game with the best defensive statistics this century. The Jayhawks also made 6-of-13 from beyond the arc that day, and they had 20 assists on 31 field goals.
It was this group at its very best. Veterans running Self’s sets to perfection. Making just enough jumpers to keep the floor spaced.
But the margins, even then, were so thin.
At that point, Kansas was a borderline top-10 team, based on the metrics. The Jayhawks were shooting 57.1 percent inside the arc — 14th-best at the time — and a respectable 37.3 percent from deep on a small volume, attempting just 30.4 percent from deep. It was working, because enough shots were going in from guys like Johnny Furphy and McCullar to give Dickinson and KJ Adams room to feast in the paint. Adams has been the closest thing to consistency the Jayhawks have had.
When Self says this team hasn’t shot it well since the second game of the season, what he means is they haven’t shot and made a high volume of 3s since then. The Jayhawks made 13 3s on opening night and 10 in their second game; they haven’t made double-digit 3s since.
But that 37.3 number? That’s solid. That’ll at least keep a defense honest.
Here’s what’s happened since: KU is shooting 24.2 percent from 3, which ranks 361st nationally during that time, according to Bart Torvik’s sorting tool.
There are 362 teams in Division I college basketball.
And that running good offense to be efficient inside the arc thing? Yeah. Doesn’t work when the defense can treat those guys out on the perimeter like the smelly teenagers who haven’t discovered deodorant yet. Kansas is shooting just 50.2 percent inside the arc during that time, good for 203rd nationally.
And when it all breaks down, there’s no one to go get you a bucket. The Jayhawks rank No. 1 nationally in assist rate, meaning they assist on more baskets (66.5 percent of them) than any other team in college basketball. Cool stat, right? Usually. But KU’s number is so high because this roster lacks a guy who can create something out of nothing.
So what happens when the defense can take away your actions because it can just sag in the paint? A coach told me a great line recently: ““Offense is spacing. Spacing is shooting. If you have great spacing, but you don’t have great shooting, you don’t have great spacing.”
It doesn’t matter where Self puts the chess pieces right now; even one of the best technicians in the game cannot fool a defense enough when it can just ignore those pieces out on the perimeter.
And what’s Kansas without even a semblance of shooting?
It is the 52nd-best team in America since Feb. 5, the day it lost 75-70 at Kansas State.
A bubble team, at best. Right behind Charleston and Loyola Chicago.
Appropriate, because when you looked out there on Wednesday night, this wasn’t the Goliath that is Kansas. This looked like a mid-major basketball team, just trying to hang with a high-major that’s headed to the NIT.
And it all comes back to the offseason. The Jayhawks not only swung and missed on Nick Timberlake (the supposed shooter who’s shooting 29.3 percent from 3) in the portal, but they also took a risk on Arterio Morris, a player with a troubled past who just got in more trouble once he got to Lawrence. (Morris was arrested on Sept. 11 and later charged with rape and subsequently dismissed from the team.) The Jayhawks signed two freshmen who didn’t even make it to the fall semester: Chris Johnson, who is now at Texas (and has scored 18 points this season) and Marcus Adams Jr., who left KU for Gonzaga and then BYU, where he’s now redshirting.
That’s three scholarships flushed down the toilet and a fourth on Timberlake that has not panned out. In recruiting, you’re always going to have swings and misses. But the hit rate has to be higher than that.
Self has been so consistent for so many years that he probably deserves a mulligan for this year, a season when the Jayhawks started preseason No. 1. It’s looked the part a handful of nights; it’s just never had enough to sustain.
(Photo of KJ Adams and Bill Self: Charlie Riedel / AP)
