There’s an elephant in the room, even as Kansas Jayhawks advance to Elite Eight
A pair of locker room doors stretched wide open, behind them a contingent of Kansas basketball players awaiting the arrival of their NCAA Tournament star.
It was a handful of minutes after KU advanced to the Elite Eight with a 66-61 win against Providence, and one player pulled out his iPhone amid the celebration, using the camera to record the last entrant.
Ochai Agbaji.
The man behind the camera.
Not in front of it.
Kansas is one win shy of a Final Four trip to New Orleans, and that’s despite Agbaji, its All-American, leaving his offense in Lawrence on Friday. The Jayhawks are winning recently unlike they won in the regular season — with key defensive stops, without the accustomed big scoring nights from Agbaji and with the man captured by Agbaji’s camera.
That would be Remy Martin, the point guard who is playing more like this team’s All-American than the All-American himself. Martin has increased his scoring total seven straight games, with 23 more Friday, the new go-get-a-bucket player for an offense that thought it already had one of those guys
Agbaji was limited to five points on 2 of 8 shooting, missing each of his four three-point attempts, a quiet night with the exception of one very loud lob that coach Bill Self drew up late. This is the trend the Jayhawks do not want to talk about, not an anomaly, and at some point you wonder just how long this combination can work:
KU winning games while its best shooter — nay, one of America’s best outside shooters — looking more Russell Westbrook than Steph Curry.
Through the first 26 games of his senior season, Agbaji connected on 44.5% of his three-pointers. Over his past 10, Agbaji has made only 17 of 66 threes, which equates to 25.8%. He’s made only 10 of his past 44, or 22.7%.
So what’s going on?
He’s pressing. He says he isn’t and probably believes he isn’t, but the nature of his shots suggest he’s playing tight. Because Agbaji is not only a better shooter than his recent skid would indicate, he’s a better decision-maker than the shots he has been taking.
Most of his offense comes within KU’s offense, but recently he’s had moments of trying to force the inverse. On Friday, for example, after leading a transition, Agbaji stopped abruptly at the three-point line and fired before his teammates had even crossed halfcourt. It barely grazed the rim.
“I think the way we play isn’t isolation. It’s getting shots off of offense (and) getting shots off the catch,” KU coach Bill Self said. “I’ll be honest with you — Ed (Cooley) and his staff, they did a good job. They took away backdoors. They took away lobs. They guarded him with 6-6 and length, so you can play half a step off and still be close enough to contest.
“We can look at it at a shooting slump, and I guess it is, but when you only take eight shots, I don’t know if I ever consider that a slump.”
It is, for it’s gone on for much longer than Friday. In the past 10 games, Agbaji has shot better than 40% from three-point range just once.
To his credit, he is still finding ways to influence a game — whether it’s a pair of key buckets and the late steal against Creighton or four blocks and the late lob Friday against Providence — but the shot is glaringly absent for the first time this season. And just like that, for the first time in his career, really, Agbaji is under-performing the outside expectations. He’s built a career out of doing the opposite.
It’s a test for how he will handle that at the next level, which means his excitement as Martin entered the room late Friday should serve as a positive sign. He will endure moments like this in the NBA. But that will come later.
For now, it says something that the Jayhawks are winning games anyway, and that’s mostly about the late-arrive development of their defense. They can now win possessions without the ball.
It sure would be nice, though if they could get a little something more out of their top option with the ball. KU is the best team left in the NCAA Tournament field and will play Miami, a double-digit seed, on Sunday with the opportunity to advance to another Final Four.
But they are only the best team left if Agbaji can get it going again — because while they might have still found this formula to be enough to squeak past an over-seeded Providence team and an under-manned Creighton team, the games do get tougher at some point. Even if that’s not Sunday. Houston or Villanova will reach the Final Four. Either would be the Jayhawks’ toughest opponent this March.
KU is good enough to beat either.
If Agbaji is part of the equation.
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This story was originally published March 26, 2022 at 12:43 AM with the headline "There’s an elephant in the room, even as Kansas Jayhawks advance to Elite Eight."