Updated 4:39 p.m. Wednesday:
Elmarko Jackson’s torn patellar tendon, which has a 12-month recovery time and so looks like it will likely end his 2024-25 season months before it was even slated to begin, has altered the roster-building calculus for the Kansas men’s basketball team for the remainder of the offseason.
Mississippi State transfer Shakeel Moore, a strong defender with years of power-conference experience, committed to KU hours after Jackson’s injury was announced Monday. But instead of the commitment of Moore bringing KU’s roster tinkering to an end, the staff must now determine whether it wants to make one more addition. And Moore is hardly a one-for-one replacement for Jackson.
Even though Jackson wasn’t likely to start — he probably would have been the sixth or seventh man for the Jayhawks, even with a leap forward following his freshman year — he would have played an integral role in the composition of this year’s squad. He would have provided a promising alternative ball-handling option as well as solid defense off the bench; his presence on the roster might have also helped create opportunities for younger players to redshirt.
Instead, Jackson is now the third offseason “loss,” after Labaron Philon and Riley Kugel decommitted, to change the appearance of a roster that at one point looked so deep that it might exceed the scholarship limit altogether.
Here’s more on how the injury Jackson suffered Tuesday afternoon changes KU’s situation.
It calls the scholarship approach into question
Jackson will occupy a scholarship slot even as he is unable to play. On Monday, KU coach Bill Self had already said he was looking to add one more starting-caliber player. That was before Jackson went down, and before Shakeel Moore announced his commitment Wednesday afternoon. Will he still look to add?
If Self ultimately determines that the Jayhawks need to pick up a second player — on top of what at times this offseason looked like it was going to be a very well-rounded group — KU will hit its 13-scholarship limit and be unable to complete its penalties from the Independent Accountability Resolution Process this year, meaning it will instead need to carry just 12 scholarship players during the 2025-26 season.
That would likely be a worse time for the Jayhawks to have slightly reduced depth, given all the veterans who will be gone that year. Even pending NBA or transfer decisions, KU will no longer have KJ Adams, Hunter Dickinson, Dajuan Harris Jr. or Zeke Mayo.
It calls redshirts into question
Rice transfer Noah Shelby announced his commitment to Kansas last month with the built-in caveat that he would be redshirting during his first season on campus. Given that Shelby is a combo guard, could the loss of Jackson lead KU’s coaching staff to put him into action sooner?
Certainly it wouldn’t be a surprise if — and Self has vaguely alluded to this possibility at times — the KU coaches felt bad about having redshirted Zach Clemence during what turned to be an injury-laden, depth-deficient year, and decided to preemptively burn Shelby’s redshirt as a result.
However, the two situations are different in a variety of ways. Self and company already knew what they had in Clemence going into his redshirt year, given that he had been on campus and played with the team for two seasons prior. They then got to see how successfully Clemence developed during his redshirt year (development the team might, in retrospect, have liked to see borne out on the court).
Shelby comes in as much more of an enigma, especially given that he has not yet lived up to his billing from the high school recruiting process at either Vanderbilt or Rice.
Even so, given that Shelby is expected to serve as a walk-on, if KU doesn’t want to use its 13th scholarship to help shore up its backcourt, it has a player on the roster that it already gave its seal of approval.
There are some additional, less definitive redshirt possibilities that also seem somewhat less likely now, even with Moore coming in, than they did when the Jayhawks arrived at Horejsi for the camp scrimmage on Tuesday. Incoming sophomore Jamari McDowell, even though he already played one year, and freshman Rakease Passmore both appeared to find themselves buried on the depth chart amid all the wing talent KU had acquired in the offseason.
All that talent is still around and healthy, but the loss of Jackson means a chunk of minutes at the 2-guard spot is up for grabs. And while Self doesn’t pay attention to such things, it certainly didn’t hurt Passmore’s perception, at least in the public eye, that he dominated in his brief scrimmage action, hitting four 3-pointers and scoring a game-high 16 points.
It makes the losses of Philon and Kugel more painful
It’s easy to forget given KU’s overall success in the transfer portal this offseason, but the Jayhawks did have two other players expected to join the team who never made it to campus in the freshman Philon and the junior transfer Kugel.
Losing Kugel, who eventually went to Mississippi State, was one thing — his projected responsibilities overlapped a lot more with the series of transfers KU picked after his initial commitment, and particularly with Alabama transfer Rylan Griffen and Wisconsin transfer AJ Storr.
But the four-star point guard Philon’s decommitment and ensuing pledge to Alabama seemed a lot easier to swallow back when he didn’t appear to have any realistic path to major minutes as a freshman (or potentially beyond that, depending how the Jayhawks’ 2025 recruiting turns out with players like Darius Acuff Jr.).
Now, the Jayhawks probably wish they had a high-potential backup point guard. They didn’t have a backup at that spot at all last season, and a second full offseason on campus for Jackson gave some hope that he might grow into that role. Instead…
It eliminates the possibility of a backup point guard with returning experience
KU no longer has a practical option with returning experience as the primary ball handler when Harris is off the court. In other words, whoever serves as the point guard in Harris’ absence will be doing so after just one offseason in Self’s system.
That doesn’t bode well, given that last year Self admitted that the Jayhawks didn’t really use a traditional point guard at all when Harris was out (Kevin McCullar Jr. or in some cases Adams took the ball up the court and initiated the offense) and didn’t run offensive sets as a result.
If Mayo or Moore or someone else like Storr, who said on Sunday he was comfortable as a primary ball handler, is charged with filling a point-guard role more than they would have otherwise because of Jackson’s injury, they won’t be doing so with the advantage of a whole year’s worth of experience at KU. Even though Storr has seen a lot in his two years at two different colleges and Mayo will be a senior, it’s not clear how well that experience could translate to being at the helm of the Jayhawks’ offense specifically.
It makes the Jayhawks a worse defense
The primary knock on Storr is that his defense does not remotely begin to stack up to his dynamic offensive prowess. Self made a form of this criticism himself at an event in Topeka on Monday.
“He needs to get where he defends and rebounds as prolifically, as proficiently as he does as a scorer,” he said. “But I do think that he’s got a chance to be as good an athlete-slash-player as we’ve had in a while. But I don’t think he plays all areas of the game as he does when the ball’s in his hands, so he can improve in those areas.”
Meanwhile, Griffen, while by reputation a strong defender, recorded an underwhelming Defensive Bayesian Performance Rating of 0.04, as logged by EvanMiya.com.
Jackson’s, for comparison, was 1.52. The sophomore had a good chance of making it onto the floor, perhaps even at the expense of his more highly touted teammates, in situations where sharp and reliable defense was necessary. Self already was willing to use him as a defensive substitution from time to time during his freshman campaign, perhaps most notably in one of his best games at the season (on the road at Baylor).
That option has now been eliminated for the foreseeable future. Yes, bringing in Moore, a former selection to the Naismith Defensive Player of the Year watchlist who tallied 142 steals in his first three years of college basketball, will certainly help, but Moore may not provide the same offensive upside at the other end that KU expected from a second-year Jackson.
This story has been updated following Moore’s commitment Wednesday afternoon.
Mike Gunnoe/Special to the Journal-World
