In a podcast interview with The Field of 68 on Wednesday night, Kansas men’s basketball coach Bill Self said that if KU were playing a game tomorrow “it’d be hard to keep” transfer guard Zeke Mayo out of the starting lineup.
“He’s been our most consistent, best guy since June, in my opinion,” Self said, reiterating a theme he had touched upon in a separate interview with Bleacher Report during the summer.
The other three players Self listed as likely starters were three returning members of last year’s lineup: KJ Adams, Hunter Dickinson and Dajuan Harris Jr.
Self further explained that Mayo helps fulfill the need for perimeter shooting that the Jayhawks had aimed to address in the offseason.
“You got Hunt, it’d be nice if you could stretch the defense around him to give him more opportunity to work, and KJ is not a guy that can do that,” Self said. “KJ can do a lot of things, and he’s improved so much, but the bottom line is, we need some shooting around those two (Adams and Dickinson), and Zeke provides that as much as anybody.”
Mayo, a Lawrence native, was the Summit League’s player of the year last season at South Dakota State, where he averaged 18.8 points per game and shot 39.1% from deep.
If KU maintains a similar hierarchy over the course of the next six weeks, that means only one of Rylan Griffen, a starter on Alabama’s Final Four team last season, and AJ Storr, one of the top scorers in the portal and a second-team All-Big Ten selection at Wisconsin as a sophomore, will be able to start. (Of course, Self often says that it’s more important who finishes a game than who starts it.)
Self spoke a bit about Storr in the interview, noting that he’s not quite sure yet of the exact contours of his player’s role for the upcoming season. Storr and Dickinson alike need to “show people what they haven’t shown them yet,” and for Storr that means “playing to his own athletic ability” by growing beyond being just a scorer, since he has the potential to be “the best offensive rebounder in the country” or a “tremendous defender.”
But Self said he doesn’t think that’s the way that Storr has seen himself in the past.
“And so I’m talking about offensive rebounding and being a lockdown defender,” Self said, “and he’s probably thinking, ‘Whoa whoa whoa whoa, what have I gotten myself into?'”
Overall, Self went through the offseason with the goal of having eight starting-caliber players for the 2024-25 campaign, and no longer needing to play Harris, Dickinson or Adams for 36 or 37 minutes, as he put it. And the depth, he said, will protect KU from being as thin as it was at times last season.
“Our two freshmen are good and one of them (Flory Bidunga) has a chance to be special,” Self said, “and then we did fairly well in the portal, so I actually think that we addressed our needs to the point where if something negative does happen, it won’t derail us like it did last year.”
The Jayhawks are now just over three weeks from Late Night in the Phog and a month from their exhibition game at Arkansas.
AP Photo/John Peterson
