Bill Self searching for answers: “We haven’t played well this last couple of weeks.”
Kansas has dropped four of eight games since Udoka Azubuike suffered a season-ending hand injury the day before the Jan. 5 KU-Iowa State game in Ames.
Realizing a .500 pace over an extended period of time is not conducive to winning Big 12 and/or national titles, KU coach Bill Self is working overtime pondering possible ways for the country’s preseason No. 1 squad to start clicking again.
“We’ve just got to kind of figure it out. We’re a different team than we were a few weeks ago,” Self said on Thursday’s Big 12 teleconference. “It doesn’t mean worse. It doesn’t mean better. It means different. But we’ve got to figure it out. We haven’t played well this last couple of weeks.”
KU (16-5, 5-3), which averages 76.7 points per game, has scored in the 60s in three of the past four games. The Jayhawks fell 65-64 on Jan. 19 at West Virginia, then defeated Iowa State 80-76 on Jan. 21 at Allen Fieldhouse before losing to Kentucky 71-63 on Saturday in Lexington, Ky., and 73-63 Tuesday at Texas.
“Lately the way people are guarding us … they are backing off,” Self said Wednesday on his Hawk Talk radio show in discussing the state of the offense. “They are trapping Dedric (Lawson) every time he touches it. They are taking away certain things that we have been successful with — getting the ball downhill and things like that.”
And the Jayhawks can’t rely on Lawson to do everything on offense.
“We don’t have anybody that is really a physical presence to post. That’s not a knock to Dedric. That’s not who Dedric is,” Self added of the 6-foot-9, 235-pound Lawson, KU’s only big in the starting lineup in a four-guard offense.
“Dedric is not a low-post guy, so we have to tinker and do some things,” Self said. “We don’t have much time to do it. You keep believing if we executed what we did and what we’ve been doing we’d be better off than just trying something totally new, but we’ve got to make some adjustments because we need to help our guys. I don’t think we’ve done a great job of helping them.
“I don’t think we’ve done a good job in putting our guys in places where they can co-exist and make each other look good. What we’ve done in the past has worked really well. It was actually working fairly well when we had our full complement of players. All of a sudden now it doesn’t look near as good.”
Self altered his starting lineup for the first time in eight games Tuesday at Texas.
Freshman Ochai Agbaji started at one of the guard slots in place of senior Lagerald Vick. Agbaji, who scored a career-high 24 points and grabbed a career-best seven rebounds, was joined in the lineup by regular starters Lawson, Devon Dotson, Quentin Grimes and Marcus Garrett.
Self hasn’t said who will start Saturday when No. 11-ranked KU takes on No. 16 Texas Tech (17-4, 5-3) in a 3 p.m. tip at Allen Fieldhouse.
“I don’t know exactly how it’s going to be two weeks from now, but we’ve got to try some different things to try to get a spark or to do something that’s a little bit out of norm because norm hasn’t been working as well,” Self said.
“I’d like to be able to say we’re going to start the same five guys all the time,” Self added. “That’s the perfect world, but it hasn’t been working as well. Maybe some guys will be better coming off the bench. Maybe some guys will show a sign that maybe we haven’t seen consistently if they get an opportunity to start. I don’t really know.”
Agbaji hit 8 of 10 shots, including 2 of 4 threes and 6 of 8 free throws, while Vick had 10 points on 4-of-9 shooting (2 of 5 from three) versus Texas.
“In Ochai we didn’t know, but certainly it didn’t hurt him at all to start,” Self said.
Self has said that he’s surprised at all the attention his starting lineups have received in his 16-year tenure at Kansas.
“People make such a big deal out of nothing. You can only start five — period,” Self said. “People want to say, ‘Well something happened or something is wrong,’ or this or that. That’s not how it really works. I think there’s probably been several times where maybe an offensive linemen didn’t start in a game and it really wasn’t a big deal. Nobody even knew about it because he’s in after the first series or whatever.
“In this particular situation it was something we felt we should try to kind of give us a kind of a different look and hopefully a little energy off the bat.”
If Self does elect to continue to start three freshmen, he said he expects those freshmen to produce.
“We’re going to have some ebbs and flows, but I don’t want to make excuses that it’s because of youth,” Self said. “We played young players before and they delivered.”
‘We’ll be fine’
Self was asked on Thursday’s Big 12 teleconference about his team’s “spirit” in the wake of back-to-back losses.
“Obviously we were down after the loss to Texas, which we should be,” Self said. “Anytime you lose you should be down. We’ll respond, and we’ll be fine.”
Texas’ take
Shaka Smart’s Texas Longhorns defeated KU by 10 points Tuesday in Austin, Texas after having lost to the Jayhawks 80-78 on Jan. 14 at Allen Fieldhouse. The Longhorns improved to 12-9 overall and 4-4 in league play heading into Saturday’s game at Iowa State (16-5, 5-3).
“I think it’s a big win for us in a couple ways,” Smart, who is 1-7 versus KU in his four years at Texas, said on the Big 12 teleconference. “First and foremost, Kansas obviously is the standard in our league. We went up there and played them really well a couple weeks ago but didn’t win, so at the end of the day you are not coming home with a ‘W,’
“One thing our guys did take out of that game (in Lawrence) is the fact we can beat them. To create the defensive effort we created in the first half against Kansas and finish the game well like we did gives our guys validation that it’s certainly something that we can go do.
“The key is building on it. If we want to finish near the top of the standings, then putting together consecutive efforts like that and staying focused on putting winning above everything else (is important). I think when you play a Kansas, when you play a North Carolina (Texas beat North Carolina 92-89 on Nov. 22), you have to be a selfish person to not put winning above all else and block everything else out. My experience with players is it can be more challenging when you are not playing that marquee blueblood name. The reality is everyone in our league is really challenging.”
Edwards cuts KU from list
Anthony Edwards, a 6-4 senior shooting guard from Holy Spirit Prep School in Atlanta, who is ranked No. 2 in the recruiting class of 2019 by Rivals.com, has cut KU from his list of schools. Edwards tells 247sports.com he has a final list of Kentucky, Florida State, North Carolina and Georgia.
This story was originally published January 31, 2019 at 6:29 PM.
