While Bill Self and the Kansas Jayhawks took care of business in the first of two Sunflower Showdown matchups this season with an 84-74 win over Kansas State, the team struggled to put away one of the Big 12’s worst units.
Following the game, Self spoke about the second-half struggles and chalked it up to one key absence.
“I thought that the first eight minutes was probably about as well as we could play, regardless of who’s in the game,” Self said. “And then I thought the last 30 minutes we missed KJ.”
The Jayhawks entered the contest without starting forward KJ Adams, who suffered a separated shoulder vs. Iowa State on Wednesday. Adams, a 6-foot-7 senior from Austin, Texas, is considered day-to-day with no official timetable to return yet.
“I would say a lot of it was KJ not being in there,” Self continued. “I mean, you look at it in the first half, I didn’t think we were great. But you give up 29 in the first half. That’s usually pretty good. You double that, they get 58, and everybody be happy with that. So I think a lot of it was our confusion on how we wanted to guard a ball screen, and then when we couldn’t guard it, then just trying to play soft. And when you play soft, you don’t really create pace or energy or turnovers. That was part of it probably as much as anything. We were just trying to, to be honest with you, get through the game as much as we were trying to be in attack mode defensively there the last 10 minutes or so.”
Self continued talking up his veteran forward, saying, “It’s a different team because we can do different things with KJ that not everybody is comfortable doing yet. So it’s certainly a different team. But maybe I should temper my expectations a little bit when we do sub, when KJ is not out there, because from a covering and making up for mistakes and things like that, it seems like today, when we made a mistake, K-State did a good job of making us pay for it. A lot of times, with KJ out there, you make a mistake and the other team didn’t even realize you made a mistake.”
While it’s no secret that Self wants Adams back on the court as soon as possible, Self doesn’t expect to see him back anytime soon.
“He’s going to be out,” Self said on the upcoming matchup vs. TCU. “I don’t want to say significant time because with KJ, you never know. But he won’t play on Wednesday. That’s for sure.”
