What I would like after today's loss...

Good list HE. I would add a players' meeting led by Mitch. (My two cents.)


--RC

Good recap HE but I disagree on at least one point. Mitch is in some ways the heart and the soul of the Jayhawks and is the icon of what we love about college basketball. But if we are to be honest, mitch simply does not have the ability to compete against talented teams. He is smart and works hard but he simply lacks the foot-quickness and skill set. Sure, he does some nice things and he is certainly not worthless. But we are talking about elite level Division 1 on a team hunting a National Championship. Mitch is okay for spot minutes in a pinch and occasionally he surprises and does some really nice things but game in game out his limited skills and quickness shows itself pretty obviously. And I am a super Mitch lover. I just have to call it like I see it.

Also, I am still not convinced Ochai is the "take over the game assassin" we need. I'm not convinced he isn't either. The jury is still out. If you could put Ochai's shooting and athleticism in Christians intensity and with Remy's aggressiveness I'd be a believer. Christian has an assassin's heart but like Mitch, he is just a few pecks short of a load on talent. But Christian is pretty close to being a great player. Remy clearly has shown the assassin's mentality. From a +/- standpoint, KU is getting the job done with Remy on the court. I am not seeing what Self is obviously seeing to pull him so often. In my mind he should have played 35 minutes yesterday.

As for David, I will post the Player ratings and +/- here in a few minutes. But here is the confounding stat for David. No one would say David is delivering at the level he should be. But the +/- says that KU has almost always done better when he is on the floor. So while his flaws are obvious, credit where credit is due. He is in some ways helping the team to be better when he is in the game.

Just the opposite was true for Jalen yesterday. What a stinker of a game for Jalen. And I mean stinker with a capital "S". If nothing else we have come to expect Jalen to be a rebounder. But he only had 2 yesterday along with missing all four of his shots and going 1-4 from the FT line. He earned a rare negative player rating. He had a player rating -10.8 below his expectation. That is epically bad. Jalen had one of the worst games a KU player has had in a while. Certainly the worst for any KU player this season. Yeah, no one was looking great to take those minutes except perhaps Yesufu. I sure would have rather seen Yesufu get about 2/3rds of Jalen's minutes yesterday.

And speaking of piss-poor player rating, Harris was not far behind Wilson. He had the second worst player rating of the year for any player behind Wilson. I may be ignorant and blind and uneducated on assessing talent, but color me unimpressed with Dajuan Harris at this point. He seems to be the golden child to hear the feedback. As I posted the other day, at most there are only 3 of the last 24 PG's to p[lay at KU in the last 38 years that I would put Dajuan ahead of. I am not convinced this team has a prayer of deep tourney success with Dajuan getting more than 15 minutes per game. At this stage, as inconsistent as Pettifore has been, I would think getting him experience would be preferable to playing Dajuan. His +/- numbers are abysmal.