Bill Self, Kansas will take NCAA tournament, make this writer prophetic
DES MOINES -- Bill Self strode out from behind the curtain and sat at the podium, an air of breezy confidence surrounding the Kansas Jayhawks' head coach as he spoke about the Jayhawks' 30-4 season that recently got his team the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA tournament.
And why shouldn't he be confident? The man has America's deepest, most balanced team during a season where the national championship will not be determined by who has the elite players but instead by who has the best chemistry, the deepest experience and the most natural fits. This is not a year ago; this is not a year with an elite tier that featured Kentucky's undefeated pursuit and Duke's stud freshmen and Wisconsin's fight for redemption with Frank Kaminsky and Sam Dekker.
This is the Year of the Very Good instead of the Year of the Great, and what Bill Self has is the best very good team in the country -- the one I picked to win it all the way back in November and the one I'm sticking with to win it all on the eve of the NCAA tournament.
This is not a sexy Kansas team. There are no likely first-round picks in the starting lineup (though there are two, perhaps three, who come off the bench). This is not a Kansas team of Andrew Wiggins and Joel Embiid nor a Kansas team of Mario Chalmers and Cole Aldrich. This is a Kansas team that's led by a senior in Perry Ellis whose game can be best described as "reliable" or "fundamental" but who played himself into the national player of the year discussion this year. Ellis is the Tim Duncan of college basketball: Good for 18 points and 11 rebounds every single night. He's so averse to dunking the ball that one of my favorite college basketball Twitter follows, @JayhawkTalk, celebrates the rare times he dunks it instead of laying it in with the hashtag "#perrydunk."
The rest of the group? Bill Self has a Noah's Ark of college hoops, with two of everything. He's got two great college point guards in Frank Mason and Devonte Graham. He's got two absurdly athletic five-star freshmen bringing energy off the bench in Carlton Bragg and Cheick Diallo. He's got two guys who can shoot the hell out of the ball in Wayne Selden and Sviatoslav Mykhaiuliuk. There's no single Alpha dog here,like Michigan State has with Denzel Valentine or Oklahoma with Buddy Hield. Instead Self has a half dozen players who any given night can step up to be the Alpha dog. What Self and all his assistants told me leading into this season -- that this is his deepest team ever -- has born fruit over the past five months.
"Our guys have been really, really loose for the last six or eight weeks," Self said Wednesday. "They've really played at a ... I don't want to say at a high level, but at a level in which they were playing with freedom, or they at least felt that. And I can't see that changing. We're not going to put any emphasis on (being the No. 1 overall seed) by talking about it. I want our guys to be the way they have been."
How loose? At Wednesday's open practices, most teams were running fairly boring, typical practices. Kansas was performing for the crowd and having fun. Diallo threw down a between-the-legs dunk. Mason and Graham each hit half-court shots. Selden tossed up a half-courter that went over the backboard, hit the shot-clock light and knocked the light off its mounting. They had the air of relaxation and confidence -- not to be mistaken for overconfidence -- that you want in a team primed to win it all.
"Kansas has all the parts to win the whole thing," read the headline on my story that ran on Nov. 12, the day before the college hoops season tipped off. I thought that a deep and balanced, experienced but star-less Kansas team was going to win it all in a season that was bereft of an obvious power team. The storyline of this season has played out as expected: A season without hierarchy, starring super seniors instead of freshman phenoms, the perfect setup for a team like Self's. And here they are now, the No. 1 overall seed, on a 14-game winning streak that began with January's overtime win over Kentucky at Allen Fieldhouse and just keeps rolling.
"This group is easier because we've been healthy," Self said of Kansas' run. "When you lose one of one of your best two or three players off your team going into the postseason or a week before the postseason, you're not whole. Sometimes you try to piece it together trying to buy time, as opposed to this is who we are, this is what we do, and go attack it that way."
"The last couple years we haven't been whole. You lose three No. 3 pick in the draft (Joel Embiid, who was injured not long before the 2014 NCAA tournament), and you lose Cliff Alexander last year and Perry Ellis last year for the most part due to a knee injury, your team takes a totally different look. And this has probably been an easier group to push forward because we haven't had to change midstream on what we are doing. We're tweaking as opposed to kind of revamping."
If Kansas does what I expect and wins it all this year, Bill Self will have done it with a team that doesn't have as much talent as past Kansas teams. This Kansas team will never be mistaken for the most talented in the country. But what they are is a bunch of parts that fit together to make a greater whole ... a coach's dream constructed by one of the nation's best coaches.
Kansas' season started earlier than just about any team's in the country, as most of the Jayhawks went to South Korea this summer as the American representative for the World University Games. And it will end later than any team's season as well, on April 4 in Houston, when Self will cut down the nets.
Follow Reid Forgrave on Twitter @reidforgrave or email him at ReidForgrave@gmail.com.
