Kansas City, Missouri — Kansas City, Missouri — Their stay at the Big 12 tournament was short for the second consecutive year, and their hope of gaining some more momentum to take into next week’s NCAA Tournament fell short in an 88-77 loss to Arizona in the Big 12 tournament quarterfinals at T-Mobile Center on Thursday night.
KU was outscored 46-20 in points in the paint and 45-13 in bench scoring.
This, just five days after the Jayhawks beat this same Arizona team with monster efforts from their four seniors.
Zeke Mayo scored 20 points. Hunter Dickinson added 19 and 12 rebounds and Dajuan Harris Jr. hit four 3-pointers and scored 16 points.
The Jayhawks struggled for much of the first half on both ends of the floor, particularly on the defensive end, where the Wildcats — like so many KU opponents this season — scored far too many points on drives to the rim and open 3-point looks.
KU kept battling, though, and actually saw their effort and increased intensity pay off. At one point, the Jayhawks had cut Arizona’s 13-point first-half lead down to 3. But the Wildcats closed the half on a mini-run to push their lead back to eight points at the break.
Early in the game, Arizona was on pace to score 110-112 points. By halftime, that pace had cooled to 90 points, but it was still abundantly clear that the Jayhawks’ defense, good or bad, was going to decide how this one wound up.
The loss dropped the Jayhawks to 21-12 overall, and now they'll have a couple of down days before learning their NCAA Tournament fate and gearing up for do-or-die time next week.
Here’s a look back at some of the highlights from Thursday night’s quarterfinal clash with Arizona at T-Mobile Center.
LIKES
• Zeke Mayo stays white hot – KU guard Zeke Mayo finished with yet another big game, scoring 20 points and knocking in 5 of 12 3-point tries on Thursday night. Thursday’s performance, in addition to being massive for the Jayhawks, marked the third game in a row of him hitting five triples or more. But what made this one really impressive was that it didn’t look early on like he had it. But he stayed with it, kept shooting, stayed aggressive and did what good shooters do — forgot about the miss and focused on the next look.
• Gotta love the hustle – Late in the first half, after a missed KU free throw, a couple of guys got their hands on the ball off the rim and deflected it out of the painted area and up for grabs. Dajuan Harris dove fully horizontal to tip it out to Diggy Coit, who quickly rifled a pass across the court to Zeke Mayo, who buried a 3-pointer to pull the Jayhawks within four, just a handful of minutes after being down by 13. The shot brought the KU crowd at T-Mobile Center to its feet, probably as much for the effort as what it read on the scoreboard. While these types of plays used to be a given with most Kansas teams, they haven’t always been with this bunch. However, in the past three weeks, the effort and desire points have been high and Kansas has competed with pride much more often than it had done earlier in the season. It wasn’t always pretty, but it was pretty clear that this game meant something to both of those teams, with players on both sides diving on the floor and selling out for loose balls all night.
• Dickinson’s 3-point resurgence – After knocking down three 3-pointers in KU’s Wednesday night win over UCF, big man Hunter Dickinson mad the first two 3-pointers he attempted on Thursday night vs. Arizona. Both of them were wide-open looks and he stepped into them with rhythm and confidence and buried them. Dickinson finished the night 2-of-5 from 3-point range, making him 6-for-11 over his last three games after being just 9 for 41 on the season before these last three games. Dickinson was pretty hard on himself for the rest of his game in the locker room after this one, going as far as to say he let his team down. But if these shots are going to be there moving forward, it’s nice to see his confidence in taking them is at a season high.
DISLIKES
• First-half implosion – Midway through the first half, with KU leading 9-8, the Jayhawks momentarily fell apart on both ends of the floor and Arizona took full advantage. The Wildcats hit three straight 3-pointers to take a 17-9 lead and then added two more to push the lead to 10. Meanwhile, the Jayhawks struggled with the ball just as much as they struggled to defend it during that stretch. Dajuan Harris and Zeke Mayo miscommunicated in the corner, leading to a turnover out of bounds. And Harris traveled while attacking the rim one possession later. The Wildcats opened the game shooting 67% overall, with five makes on six 3-point attempts, in the first 9 minutes of the game.
• Very little from Griffen or Storr – In the home win over Arizona, it was the four KU seniors who carried the team to a meaningful Senior Day win. But we’ve seen enough from this team to know that that’s not going to be how things go every night. They’re going to need SOMETHING from their supporting cast. And it can’t just be 3-point shots by Diggy Coit. On Wednesday night, AJ Storr did his part, with a KU-career-high 19 points during a breakout performance against UCF. But he came back down to Earth on Thursday and finished with 0 points on 0-for-2 shooting, with 2 turnovers in just 9 minutes. Griffen, meanwhile, who has remained in the starting lineup despite being pretty quiet and ineffective in recent outings, finished with just 2 points on 1-of-5 shooting. He has now scored just 9 points in his last four games, including goose eggs against Houston and on Wednesday night against UCF.
• OT on Wednesday might’ve cost ‘em – There’s no real way to quantify this, and KJ Adams said after Thursday’s loss that fatigue late had nothing to do with it. But it sure looked like the Jayhawks ran out of gas in the final few minutes on Thursday night. Down just one with 5:43 to play, the Jayhawks were outscored 18-8 in the final five minutes and several of the shots that they missed during that stretch came up short. It makes sense, given how much the Jayhawks had to extend themselves to get by UCF in overtime on Wednesday night. And it makes even more sense when you consider the pace with which Arizona tried to play all night. Whether that’s just how the Wildcats roll or if the up-and-down tempo was by design, it worked in Arizona’s favor in a big way. Especially late.
Said Dickinson on the fatigue factor: “I don't think you can blame fatigue. In this NIL era we are paid to play, so you've got to be professionals and approach it like professionals. You can’t give that excuse. I think it starts with me. I've got to be better for my team and give them more energy. I feel like I let them down defensively.”
WHAT THE?
• A somber Selection Sunday? – They’ll get a couple of days to regroup and I’m sure they’ll be enthused about their opportunity and road when the bracket finally comes out on Sunday. But there’s very little question that this will be one of the more interesting Selection Sundays for Kansas basketball in recent memory. We already know the Jayhawks are going to be the lowest seed they’ve been in the Bill Self era. We also know not too many people are going to be picking them to make much of a run. So, it’ll be interesting to see just how positive they can be about whatever fate they receive, be it a 6 seed or a 7 seed in the Big Dance. It’s hard to see them being any higher or lower than that, so the smart money’s on a 6 or a 7, facing a good 10 or 11 in Round 1 and then a 2 or 3 in Round 2 if they get by the first game.
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