KU / Duke Takeaways
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I’m still on a buzz after yesterday’s game. Why shouldn’t I buzz like a beehive? We scored a big win against a stable of lottery picks and the tallest team in the country!
DUKE CALLS: YES. The phenomenon lives on! We can no longer say it’s favoritism towards K. I will start with the obvious… no punishment for undercutting Hunter! Anyone who has ever dribbled a basketball knows that was a complete cheap shot and warranted a severe call. Hunter retaliated… and I know everyone will jump on Hunter for doing what he did. I thought that way, too, at the time. Having a night to sleep on it… Hunter did the right thing! Only Hunter can stick up for his protection on the court because big guys are always targeted for cheap shots that can put them out of commission. I wish he had blooded his face. Might as well since he received the death penalty.
Now for the Duke call no one is talking about. “The game is won by inches and tenths of seconds!” This is what I was taught playing ball in my youth. Duke advanced the ball to half-court only using .1 second. That is absolutely impossible! It is not possible to catch a ball and call time out using .1 second. Usually, the standard of minimum time to run off a clock on an inbounds play is .3 seconds. This is the minimum. Having one player both catch the ball and call timeout should be a good .5 seconds. This had me screaming every bit as much as the Hunter call!
BILL SELF IS ALIVE AND WELL! Am I the only one who noticed how good Bill looks this season (concerning his health)? He was running the sidelines and coaching throughout the game but especially down the stretch. I recall entire seasons where he sat on the bench and whispered to an assistant during games.
KJ’s BEST GAME AS A JAYHAWK! I’m going along with that! He made many key plays and baskets, and mostly, he shutdown Cooper for most of the game. But he did have help, and I had mentioned before Self might pull something out of his bag… and he did… with constant double-teams and it worked very well!
JUAN LOOKING TO SCORE! Finally! I said earlier that we can’t go too far if Juan leads us in scoring. I’m not so sure now. For one reason, we have balanced scoring coming from everyone on the team! They are all a threat and contribute and it happens often when not expected… but appreciated! Juan has turned his game up a notch and we will be hard to beat in March if we stay healthy and Juan keeps his pedal to the metal!
HUMILITY AND PERSPECTIVE HAVE TO BE MAINTAINED! Okay, we’ve beaten some good teams early on and remain undefeated and #1, but come on, this team has a long way to go before we proclaim their greatness. We were lucky on Duke’s second-to-last play that Kon didn’t see a wide-open Cooper on the trey line! That would have done wonders for the kid’s short college stint legacy!
DUKE REMAINS AMERICA’S TEAM TO HATE! They have become a recruiting monster that gets about all the players they want. That Kon kid is almost as good as Cooper. All I can say is the pressure is on Scheyer to turn lottery picks into titles. If he can’t soon, he’ll end up another Calipari… selling dreams and bragging rights for a big goose egg in March! I hope he fails miserably!
SUDDENLY WE LEARNED TO SHOOT FTS?! 91.7% from the line? Look how important that was in this game! Had we shot 70% we probably would have lost this game! Can we expect this every game? Of course not! But we shouldn’t be a mediocre FT shooting team. We have a team full of shooters and we should maintain one of the higher percentages in the country! Come on, fellas, take pride in this stat and focus on it!
LOVING OUR DEPTH! I still have PTSD from last year! But I will get over it… and quickly… because we now have a bench capable of keeping up with our starters and sometimes sparking a fire in our play!
RCJH!
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@drgnslayr that was a great read, thanks for sharing!
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Yes - great observations Slayer… And it appears Self is actually playing his bench a lot more this year early on rather than riding his starting 5 to exhaustion come March.
The more the bench gets meaningful minutes, the better we will be. Let them play through mistakes and not bench them immediately as Self has done in the past.
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What a wonderful feeling.
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Every one of our guys gave us their A game at some point in the game. Self did a great job putting the pieces together, along with the refs ejecting Hunt
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I was really happy to see the bench come through 2nd half. After 4 pts in the 1st they scored 15 (out of 34 total) in the 2nd half. We seem to have 9 guys who can rotate through without any big drop offs. Been awhile since we e had that.
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KJ had an awesome block of Flagg around 14:35 which they didn’t replay. Pretty egregious.
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Watch this thing of beauty. https://x.com/MSwain247/status/1861854864340402243. (if you can’t watch it’s DaJuan crossing Flagg and finding Griffen at the line for a 3.
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@wissox Concerning that exact move by Juan … From an article about the game from The Athletic-
“Harris had a name for the move where he jumps over the baseline — “the Juando drill” — explaining that the Jayhawks practice it and he knows exactly where he’s going with the ball when he leaves his feet.”
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Analysis
KU is good wow. But seriously I haven’t felt this good about the team since 22.
We really went from Timby and Parker Braun to Rylan (or Storr) and Flory off the bench.
@approxinfinity said in KU / Duke Takeaways:
Every one of our guys gave us their A game at some point in the game. Self did a great job putting the pieces together, along with the refs ejecting Hunt
Coit was pretty bad in all fairness and didn’t look playable against Duke. That’s the worst part of the Shak injury.
However we shouldn’t see too many teams with the pure size of Duke, which caused issues for Coit. I’m not trying to be too down on him, and it’s nice that we’ve been able to get 17mpg out of him.
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@BShark I agree the bench looks so much better. I also agree re Coit — he looked small (very) against a tall Duke team. He was 1-2 and played with some intensity, but the height and length gap was obvious
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@BShark said in KU / Duke Takeaways:
Analysis
Coit was pretty bad in all fairness and didn’t look playable against Duke. That’s the worst part of the Shak injury.
However we shouldn’t see too many teams with the pure size of Duke, which caused issues for Coit. I’m not trying to be too down on him, and it’s nice that we’ve been able to get 17mpg out of him.
Is Shak still hurt or re-hurt?
Funny bit of synchronicity, I met two people in the elevator on the way to the game last night:
Diggy’s representative and the ref who called the flagrant 2 on Hunter!
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Was said multiple times last night and then again today , Duke has the tallest team in the Nation ? pp Whaaa , I’m not sure that’s right is it ?
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Yes it averages out to 6’7" KU is the oldest team.
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Duke has an 8 man rotation and their smallest players are 6-5. If Coit is in, his only use is as a 3 point shooter because nobody is scared of him driving so he’s going to have issues with playability all season, especially in league play where teams typically have more size.
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@rockchalkjayhawk said in KU / Duke Takeaways:
@BShark said in KU / Duke Takeaways:
Analysis
Coit was pretty bad in all fairness and didn’t look playable against Duke. That’s the worst part of the Shak injury.
However we shouldn’t see too many teams with the pure size of Duke, which caused issues for Coit. I’m not trying to be too down on him, and it’s nice that we’ve been able to get 17mpg out of him.
Is Shak still hurt or re-hurt?
Funny bit of synchronicity, I met two people in the elevator on the way to the game last night:
Diggy’s representative and the ref who called the flagrant 2 on Hunter!
Same injury but he re-aggravated it I believe.
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@BShark rough. Hope he is able to be full speed this year.
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@approxinfinity said in KU / Duke Takeaways:
@BShark rough. Hope he is able to be full speed this year.
Really difficult now. They were talking about maybe getting him back by the new year. Makes it harder to mesh but he clearly has more of a P4 body and Coit. He has also already proven it at this level.
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I still wonder about the non-call on Maliq Brown. I’ve watched the play numerous times and clearly Brown was backing into Hunter while he was going up for his rebound resulting in the undercutting and subsequent pile up. Funny, a Sports Ill. writer wrote that Dickinson was rebounding over Brown’s back. What a dumbass. When Dickinson’s shot misses, Brown is under the basket and is bent at the waist, then backs two steps into Dickinson while he’s in the air rebounding. The pile up takes place 6 ft from where Brown started under the rim. I guess since KU won, no one is talking about Brown; only Hunter is being villianized. I’m proud of KU for rallying after the ridiculous ejection, but I sure would like to see more support for Hunter and someone calling out Brown for his instigation of the initial contact.
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@Texas-Hawk-10 Can he drive and dish
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@drgnslayr I rarely rewatch games but I wanted to see how we survived the Hunter ejection. At the 3 second mark, they had added .3 to the clock so when the play started it was 3.3, not 3.0. During the TO Scheyer was talking to the ref and I’m sure he was telling him to watch for the time out. Pretty standard practice for coaches to inform refs they’re going to call for a TO to save a few precious ticks of the clock.
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If you watched UCONN take it’s third loss in a row last night against Dayton… you experienced Karaban make the same undercut that happened to Hunter. He was called for a flagrant 1. In our case, we have our big ejected for reacting off being targeted to be injured. This was a crime!!
@wissox Are you sure about that? I only saw 3.0 go to 2.9. I’ll rerun it and check.
Coit wasn’t effective because of the height and athleticism. But he will be valuable in other situations. I’m thrilled how our guys did against the height!
We seem to have plenty of SPARK on this team! Some of that energy has to be from running in so many players so everyone gets some rest. I hope we get Shak back soon!
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@stoptheflop that was the initial call. Brown fouls Dickinson. Then the fake grazing call made Brown’s foul disappear. The refs blew it all the way around. It was a blow job.
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@nuleafjhawk They did call Brown foul BUT it was just a common foul then they tore into Hunter
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@SlimShaddy54 I heard the announcers say Brown fouled, but I never heard the refs call it.
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@stoptheflop I’m pretty sure we didn’t get the ball or any free throws. Like I said … blow job
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Just back from Las Vegas!
We had a good trip. There were a zillion Jayhawks walking around. love that. I don’t get to say Rock Chalk very often out here on the West Coast. Everybody was fired up to beat the Dookies.
Getting into the game was a bit weird for my wife. They turned her away because her purse was larger than allowed. Oddly they also turned away a lady with a newborn and a diaper bag. So, she had to scramble to run across the street to the hotel to ditch her bag! I guess we don’t go to many events and had no clue that size matters!
We got there plenty early, so she didn’t take long to make it back.The atmosphere in the arena was just crazy. I’d say there was a slight Jayhawk lean in the crowd. Lots of Duke fans as well. But, you could really hear the Rock Chalk chants loud and clear. I may be a bit clueless, but do any other schools chant like KU does? Duke didn’t have anything but a subtle “Let’s Go Duke!” boo. The arena DJ had the crowd hopping.
One very weird thing about the arena…they didn’t really have a scoreboard. Weird. You know how it’s often placed on a wall here or there, or an electronic scroll. nada. They’d have it up on the big monitor thing sometimes as the game was on, but there were times i was like: how much time is left? What’s the freaking score? They did post some player stats in a few corners.
About the fans: Lots of happy Jayhawks everywhere. Plenty of Duke losers. We did lots of standing during the game. The Jayhawk fans behind us said that was pretty much the norm at the Fieldhouse. So, they were used to it. But, it was mostly because of “that guy” Duke fan. Just maniacal. Most of the fans around us were fine, but there’s always that one guy. Wore his Duke jersey, with no shirt underneath. Sister Hazel hat on backwards. SCREAMING profanities at the top of his lungs while standing most of the game. crazed. Cliche. Oh well, it was nice to see him weep when the game ended. Oh, and just to hammer on Duke some more…there was another totally classless Duke fan dude playing table games in our quiet little casino. Just making a top of his lungs screaming ass of himself. Everybody in the entire place pretty much kept turning around to look at him, wondering WTF was up. Jail soon?
Otherwise lots of camaraderie
So about the Hunter flagrant 2…we really had no clue what was happening in the arena when it happened. We saw him make an exceptional second effort rebound, fall, but that was about it. Seemed like a Duke player undercut him and should have been called for a foul. After a really long delay, they booted him. We really didn’t know why or what the hell happened. I have to watch the replay.
Dajuan was awesome. He did some crazy baseline dribbling that had me worried, but others have posted that they actually practice that.
Bidunga. I was honestly very worried about him playing, especially when Hunter went out. Didn’t feel any comfort when he dribbled the ball off his foot on a post up! But he stepped up big time. Love it. Oh, and that Duke center was HUGE!!!
KJ was by far the MVP. He pretty much shut down Flagg, except for that massive dunk.
And Storr started! WTF? Has coach said why? I thought he played great.
Zeke is oddly smooth with the ball. he shakes, stutters and finds pockets of empty space to make something happen. impressive live.
Hunter was way off his game early. Put up some bad shots. He kinda got in the flow later.
It seemed that momentum changed more than a few times after KU was up big. The crowd was buzzing, then silent when KU would hit a dagger.
And KU is still undefeated in Vegas with me watching! 3-0! I’ll take credit.
Rock Chalk
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@rockchalkjayhawk as a fellow west coast Jayhawk (moved here years ago but kept my old buckets moniker) I can definitely relate to not getting to say rock chalk here very often. But a nice surprise when I see someone wearing the gear (or they see mine). Not in the LA area are you?
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@StLJhawk said in KU / Duke Takeaways:
@rockchalkjayhawk as a fellow west coast Jayhawk (moved here years ago but kept my old buckets moniker) I can definitely relate to not getting to say rock chalk here very often. But a nice surprise when I see someone wearing the gear (or they see mine). Not in the LA area are you?
Yup, it’s always nice to see a Jayhawk out here for sure. I’m up in the Bay Area though. My folks lived down in SoCal for a long time, so i’ve spent lots of time down in the LA area. Rock Chalk fellow West Coaster!
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Nice! Wife is from Marin. Might have to try Vegas bball trip sometime, lot closer than Lawrence!
