- Darryn Peterson’s inconsistent availability has raised concerns about his potential as a No. 1 NBA Draft pick.
- Coach Bill Self is focused on whether Kansas can find consistency for a deep NCAA Tournament run.
- The Jayhawks have shown flashes of high-level play, including a victory against Houston.
The great debate within the larger basketball community hinges on Darryn Peterson’s durability and whether questions surrounding it will cost the ballyhooed Kansas freshman the No. 1 spot in the NBA draft.
How serious are the hamstring and cramping issues that have limited Peterson to playing in 17 of his team’s 28 games and just 465 of the 1,130 minutes his team has played?
Is he soft, is he disinterested, or is he really that impaired by injuries? Are these health issues that’ll clear up with a little time, or will the durability concerns follow him long-term into the pros?
Force yourself to look at this from a different vantage point, and perhaps you might even convince yourself Peterson is persistent for still playing and not shutting it down and proceeding directly to the NBA lottery.
Anyway, these are questions NBA evaluators must consider.
The bigger question atop Bill Self’s mind: Can his team — his team, with or without Peterson on the floor — develop the consistency necessary to make a deep run in the NCAA Tournament?
On its good nights, No. 14 Kansas looks like a bruiser with enough balance and mettle to be a March Madness menace.
“Our ceiling is high,” Self said on ESPN, minutes after picking apart No. 4 Houston in a 69-56 victory, “but also we can play to any level.”
Bad Kansas, then good Kansas. Good Jayhawks show up against Houston
The past two games illustrated this team’s bipolarity. The Jayhawks were woeful in a blowout loss to Cincinnati, a team on the wrong side of the March Madness bubble. Two days later, Kansas routed a Houston squad with Final Four potential.
We should have known a bounce-back performance was coming. Couple of things you must know about Self: He doesn’t lose back-to-back home games. And he doesn’t lose at home on Big Monday. Period.
Big Monday serves as a good test of a squad’s durability, because it thrusts teams back into action two days after their previous game. In that way, it mimics the March Madness structure of playing twice in three days.
Houston had dead legs at Allen Fieldhouse. Two days after losing to Arizona, and one week after losing to Iowa State, the Cougars shot 32% against Kansas. That’s three straight losses for Houston against top-15 teams within the nation’s most rugged conference.
“We just ran out of steam,” Houston coach Kelvin Sampson said.
Contrast Houston’s fatigued performance to that of Kansas, which kept playing better the longer the game went.
Afterward, Self kept looking at the box score printout during a postgame interview with Scott Van Pelt.
He couldn’t have cared less that Flory Bidunga only scored four points, because Kansas’ big man made life miserable for Houston at the other end of the court.
“Totally dominant,” Self said of Bidunga.
Self noticed, too, that Tre White shook of his shooting slump to pour in a season-high 23 points.
“He was great tonight,” Self said.
And although he made no mention of it, it couldn’t have been lost on Self that Peterson played 30 minutes. Didn’t play great, but he made some significant buckets. Neither the best nor the worst player on the court, but a guy on the court all the same for most of the game, long enough to score 14 points.
Darryn Peterson quiets hot takes for one night, anyway
At no point during this game could you have rationally believed Kansas would be better off parting with Peterson, as some have recently suggested.
Everyone’s got a hot take on Peterson, and that includes the personalities who wield the largest megaphones.
“I can’t trust him,” ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith said recently.
That counts as a mild opinion.
Now, for the spicy:
“Sometimes a divorce is good for everyone involved,” Dick Vitale wrote on social media after the Cincinnati loss, and “I firmly believe that needs to happen NOW (at Kansas). The Darryn Peterson soap opera needs to end.”
Well, that’s a take.
Here’s an alternative one: Kansas cannot count on Peterson to be the driving force behind a Final Four run. He’s talented, but unreliable. The Jayhawks likely need him to be on the court, contributing, to advance to the tournament’s final weekend, but they’ll also need elite defense from Bidunga and big performances from White and Melvin Council Jr., like the Jayhawks got against Houston.
At times throughout this season, Self has sounded understandably frustrated at Peterson’s sporadic availability.
“There is one way (for Peterson) to change the narrative. Play. Finish,” the veteran Kansas coach said earlier this season.
Now, Self acknowledges Kansas playing so many minutes without the future NBA lottery pick has “forced our other guys to grow up.”
Those are the type of compliments that follow an impressive victory. Just two days earlier, Self called his team soft — not just Peterson, but the whole dang team.
From soft, to resolute, in two days’ time.
Kansas has now beaten Arizona, Iowa State and Houston. Those are caliber of opponents a team must be able to handle to reach April.
And still, even Self doesn’t sound like he knows what to expect from his team from one game to the next or whether Peterson will be on the court from one minute to the next.
“I have a decent feel of who we need to be,” Self said. “Do I know who we are? No. But, I still think we’ve got time to figure it out.”
Blake Toppmeyer is a columnist for the USA TODAY Network. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.
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