How a player who took only two shots set the tone in KU’s blowout over Missouri
Kansas point guard Dajuan Harris stood about 45 feet shy of the bucket, a basketball dribbling between his legs as he sized up Missouri guard Nick Honor.
Within a couple of steps, Harris glided past his defender, though Missouri forward Kobe Brown would greet him next, a chain reaction that would eventually bring Missouri forward Aidan Shaw to the party, too.
And then, wouldn’t you know it, they were suddenly following the wrong guy. Harris flicked a pass over his shoulder, without even a glance at its destination — the arms of K.J. Adams, who would turn the play into a wide-open dunk.
Harris knew.
Missouri knows now.
Too late.
Kansas drubbed Missouri 95-67 on Saturday in the first Border Showdown played inside Mizzou Arena in more than a decade.
Kansas won the game Missouri wanted to play, at the tempo Missouri confusingly requested to play it, and it won with the player Missouri decided it could live without.
The end result was a competitive dud — a waste of a sold-out and animated crowd that included Missouri football and basketball coaches past and present — unless you bought a ticket to witness an offensive clinic with a hometown kid as the tour guide. (The, ahem, chants suggested this is not why they had packed the arena.)
Harris, a graduate of Rock Bridge High School in Columbia, turned Missouri’s aggressive pressure defense into something resembling a team of matadors, and it was as though they were powerless to stop it — it might have helped if they had at least tried something different in the first half.
To be fair, KU shot the ball so well that it could’ve beaten any team in the country Saturday afternoon, a ceiling not many others have, but man if Mizzou didn’t offer much more resistance than open gym.
The reason?
Harris. The man who took two shots in a 95-point outing.
See, Mizzou applied full-court pressure most of the afternoon, forcing Harris to expend both time and energy to get the ball past half-court, and that’s about the extent of its success. Because possession after possession, he skirted by a nearest defender (frequently with the aid of a pick) and looked for an opening. Or an open teammate.
He shot only twice — made them both — but was credited with nine assists. If we’d have watched a hockey game, he might have been credited with a dozen others.
Some would instruct you to take individual plus/minus with a grain of salt, so I’ll preface this with that, but Kansas was plus-33 with Harris on the floor Saturday afternoon and minus-5 with him sitting next to Bill Self.
And what better audience for the show? Harris maxed out his ticket request for 20 family and friends in his hometown, and he figured several more purchased their own entries.
Earlier this week, when asked if he thought Harris might have a little extra juice to play in his hometown, Self had said he would rather Harris take the inverse route and just settle down.
He did.
And brought the game with him.
“Everybody played well now — don’t get me wrong — but he takes two shots and he’s great,” Self said. “In a game like that, they didn’t make make Dajuan beat them because they guard everybody. There will be some people (who) will try to make Juan beat them, because they may back off, but Missouri guards everybody. Which that’s what aggressive teams do. But I thought his poise was tremendous.”
And then one more sentence, nearly in carbon-copy form by now, perhaps in hopes that if he keeps repeating it, enough people might believe it:
“He’s a damn good guard that doesn’t get nearly the credit for being as good as he is,” Self said.
How can we dispute it?
A decade ago, these trips to Columbia weren’t always this easy, and that’s not just about where Missouri is, in its infancy of trying to grow this thing, but rather the absence of the weapon KU implemented on Saturday — a point guard who refuses to succumb to the environment.
When asked if the noise, which began well before tipoff, had been a factor for him, Harris pointed out, “Nah, because I was just in the national championship game (with) 70,000. So, no, I just embraced it and handled my business.”
Indeed, there was a been-here-before feel to Saturday’s outcome, and that contrasted the other bench in a severe form. Missouri’s schedule played in its favor to a 9-0 start. This one will play in its favor for the educational component.
The Tigers took advantage of a soft nonconference slate, where their end-to-end tempo thrived. That becomes a taller task when the other team can out-athlete you.
If that wasn’t obvious before, well, sure is now. The Tigers were dazed before they even knew they’d been on the wrong end of an uppercut. KU had built a 19-point lead in 11 1/2 minutes.
A sold-out crowd deserved a better game. Instead, it received a reminder of the distance between two rivals separated by only a couple hundred miles.
With a point guard playing only a few miles from home.
Harris was an under-recruited player at Rock Bridge — initially committing to Missouri State with a couple of teammates — and earlier this week estimated that he heard from Missouri only after it became apparent Kansas was interested. That wasn’t this coaching staff’s oversight.
But it was its punishment nonetheless.
Harris had tried to downplay the personal significance of the matchup, but he was flanked by teammates Kevin McCullar and K.J. Adams in his post-game news conference, and they were eager to talk on his behalf.
“I know I was out there competing for him every possession,” McCullar said.
“I know this game was really special for Juan,” Adams said.
Well, and vice versa.