Jayhawks’ shaky play surprises Self

DETROIT | Bill Self watched the last shot on both knees. It was that sort of ending. Someone should have passed around a collection plate. Self watched Davidson’s Jason Richards catch the ball at the top of the key, shoot it in an off-balance way, and as the clock dropped to 0:00, the ball lofted toward the basket, it looked no good, then good, then not so good again — victory, then defeat,  then …

Then the ball hit the backboard. Bounced away. The buzzer sounded. Kansas beat Davidson 59-57. Bill Self, in his fifth chance, will take a team to the Final Four. Self dropped his head. He slapped the floor with his hand. He walked toward the Davidson bench in a dazed way — like a boxer walking back to his corner after a crushing punch. He hugged his family. He cut down the final strands of the net. He got doused with water in the locker room.

“Relief,” he would say when asked his feelings as the last shot did not go in.

Well … relief works, too. Sometimes breakthroughs don’t come with ticker-tape parades. This game had not played at all the way Bill Self had imagined. Oh, he fully expected this Kansas-Davidson game to be close, very close, painfully close. But he did not expect it to be this kind of close. His Jayhawks played scared. Self had not seen that coming. His Jayhawks played as if they were wearing Buick-sized ankle weights.

“You have to go take what you want,” Self would remember telling his players before the game. “You have to go into attack mode.”

This is Self’s speech. This is what he tells his players all the time. You have to take it.

They did not. Maybe they could not.

“Attack the attacker,” Davidson coach Bob McKillop had told his players, and the Wildcats came at the Jayhawks, pounded inside with the bigger players, pressed them full court, defended Kansas with gusto. Of course, Self knew that Davidson would do those things; the Wildcats had upset Gonzaga, Georgetown and Wisconsin by doing those things, by attacking the attacker.

No, Self’s surprise came when the Jayhawks backed down. They scored one basket in the first 5 minutes of the game. They short-armed shots they had made all year. At one point in the first half, they were so flustered they called two timeouts on the same possession. They looked lifeless — no, they were trying, it was something else. They seemed frozen with stage fright.

Self sat on his stool on the sideline, and his face was flush with disbelief. This was his nightmare. He could take losing. But he could not take his team playing timid basketball.

“What’s going on out there?” he screamed more than once.

It was, frankly, hard to tell what was going on. The only thing that was clear was that Kansas did not look at all like Kansas. The Jayhawks’ offense — so smooth, so crisp, so lethal all year — seemed to be running in slow motion, as if under strobe lights. The Jayhawks had real trouble just getting the ball in-bounds. Their fast break was virtually nonexistent. The Jayhawks’ alley-oop, a specialty all year, did not oop once the whole first half.

“Go! Go! Go!” Self screamed at his guys, and he made helpful hand gestures, but something was wrong. The Jayhawks would not go. It was strange.

And then again … maybe it was not. Pressure will do strange things to men. The pressure on this Jayhawks team was immense. First, none of them had ever been to a Final Four. The seniors had lost in the first round twice, they had been beaten down by UCLA in the Elite Eight last year — they knew the score.

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To reach Joe Posnanski, call 816-234-4361 or send e-mail to jposnanski@kcstar.com. For previous columns, go to KansasCity.com.