Locked On Jayhawks - Daily Podcast On Kansas Jayhawks Football & Basketball - Kansas Jayhawks Basketball Transfer Portal Target Deep Dive: BYU Wing Jaxson Robinson

Starting point is 00:00:00 On today's Locked on Jayhawks, Jackson Robinson, the Big 12 Sixth Man of the Year, is in the transfer portal deep diving how he'd fit with KU. You are Locked on Jayhawks, your daily podcast on the Kansas Jayhawks. Part of the Locked on Podcast Network, your team every day. I'm Derek Johnson. Find me on Twitter at DJohnsonRadio. You can find our show here with Locked on Jayhawks anywhere you get your podcast, including on our YouTube page where you can like and subscribe to the show. On today's edition of LOJ, we're breaking down Jackson Robinson,

Starting point is 00:00:38 the Big 12 Sixth Man of the Year for BYU, who had a really strong season for the Cougars, entered the transfer portal the other day. Certainly Kansas has made him a target in the portal season. So deep diving into his game, what he would bring to the table, how he'd fit in with KU on this episode of the show as the transfer portal is winding down to a close in terms of the entrance here for college basketball.

Starting point is 00:01:02 First, today's episode is brought to you by FanDuel. Make every moment more. Right now, new customers get $150 in bonus bets guaranteed. That's $150, win or lose. Just visit fanduel.com slash locked on, and you can be a part of the awesome fun and get started there. Again, fanduel.com slash locked on. All right, let's get started here with Jackson Robinson, the deep dive.

Starting point is 00:01:29 He just entered the portal earlier this week. He is a 6'7", 190-pound wing. You could honestly play him at the shooting guard, the three. He even, over the last five games of the season, and I think this went over other games too for them, but I could only find the stats for the last five games of the season, and I think this went over other games too for them, but I could only find the stats for the last five games, he played nearly 20 minutes per game as the foreman for BYU this past season over the last five games.

Starting point is 00:01:55 He's originally from Ada, Oklahoma, but, yeah, most recently attended BYU, where obviously they were a tournament team. They beat Kansas and Allen Fieldhouse. He does have power conference-level experience, though, as BYU was his third school. And if he ends up at a new school next year after entering the portal and decides not to return from the portal, it'll be his fourth school, which is not, I guess, new in today's age of college basketball,

Starting point is 00:02:19 nor to even a school like Kansas, who, you know, AJ Storrs on his seventh school in seven years, if you count high school and stuff like that. But Robinson actually entered college as a four-star recruit to Texas A&M, where he played 14 games as a true freshman, and that was in the non-counting COVID 2020 to 2021 season. Then he transferred to Arkansas, where he appeared in 16 games as a second-year freshman,

Starting point is 00:02:43 and then he transferred his third time, this time to Provo with BYU, where in his first season with the Cougars, he played 33 games with 30 starts, averaged 8.5 points per game, 34% from three on over five tries per game. Then this past season, he ended up coming off the bench. He was a fourth-year junior, so he will be a fifth-year senior this next year with one year left to play, but ended up being the sixth man on that really good BYU team that got a sixth seed in the NCAA tournament, and he averaged 14.2 points per game, which is very real production

Starting point is 00:03:20 at the Big 12 level. He shot 42.6% from the floor. He shot 35.4% from a three-point range, and that was on very high volume, 6.9 three-point attempts per game. So he basically was taking seven three-pointers per game, which nearly half of what Kansas was averaging per game is what he did on his own. 91% free throw line, and then not much else. Two and a half rebounds per game, 1.3 assists per game,.7 steals,.4 blocks. He did, even though he was coming off the bench, he was playing the third most minutes on BYU at 26 and a half minutes per game,

Starting point is 00:03:56 who does go deep into their bench or did under Mark Pope. But he was essentially a starter that just happened to be coming off the bench. Big 12 play did not go as efficiently for Jackson Robinson this past season. He shot just 30% from three in Big 12 plays. That certainly went down. And in BYU's offense, he was a bit of a chucker, I guess you could say. But I don't know if that's more about him or the offensive style that BYU runs, where it's like, hey, we're just going to have everybody chucking from the outside

Starting point is 00:04:27 and get up shots, and on certain days it's going to look great, on other days it's not going to look as good. And so you're going to have kind of those ebbs and flows over the course of the season. And because of that, he only shot 31% from three in 20 games against Ken Palm top 100 opponents. That said, he did shoot 40% from three in 20 games against Ken Palm top 100 opponents that said he did shoot 40 percent from three in the 12 games against Ken Palm top 100 opponents the year before so it was much better

Starting point is 00:04:51 uh I will say he did play very well in their lone NCAA tournament game he was the lone reason that they even had a fighting chance toward the end of that game 25 points on 8 of 15 shooting against Duquesne played very well on the big stage there. And I do think there's something to be said that, you know, for BYU, as much as they had a ton of great shooters this year, which they absolutely did. And they had a couple unique matchups with their big men, like Fusani Traore was just a bowling ball. And then with Ali Khalifa, you basically had this passing, high finesse, very skilled big man that they presented a lot of matchup problems.

Starting point is 00:05:29 But he was kind of the one guy who was like, hey, we need somebody to go beat somebody off the dribble or go create a shot for us at the end of a shot clock situation. And so he had to do that maybe a little bit more than you would necessarily want or would need to if he was at Kansas. But he wound up winning still a great season, the 2024 Big 12 Sixth Man of the Year Award. He was All-Big 12 Honorable Mention, which given that I'm just quickly scouring

Starting point is 00:05:58 through, I believe nine of the 15 All-Big 12 first, second, or third team members in the postseason are either graduating, transferring, or going pro. I mean, you're talking about six back, and then you're talking about that puts him as a real candidate to be a projected top 10 to 15 player in the Big 12 next year at BYU, or if you were to come to another Big 12 school like Kansas with real NBA upside. I mean, the Athletic has him at number 79 on their top 100 for this year's draft. So if you come back another year and display another year of improvement, it's not

Starting point is 00:06:29 crazy that he is an NBA draft pick. And, you know, to add that this late in the portal game, you don't see that out there that often. So the scouting report, when you're looking at some of this other stuff, even though his percentages don't look overly high, they don't look low, like 42 and a half percent from the field, on high volume from three those are those are solid like Kansas shot uh well below 35 from three as a team and Robinson was well above that and he shot very high volume so like it's not that it's it's low volume but it wasn't you know super efficient either but um because he took so many threes the math game added up and he ended up ranking in the 75th percentile on synergy in overall offense and he was in the 73rd percentile with his jump shot

Starting point is 00:07:13 and one i think cool stat to look at is true shooting percentage which takes into account your twos your threes and your free throws and it weights them differently. Obviously, you know, shooting say 40% from three is the equivalent of shooting 60% from two. But if you're just looking at raw field goal percentage, shooting 40% from three, if you shot every shot from three, you would see, oh, he's only shooting 40% from the field and it doesn't look as good. But in reality, the true shooting percentage would give you credit to be like, if you shot 40% on threes, that's the equivalent of shooting, you know, 60% on twos, right? So he actually is true shooting percentage was a 56.6%. And that was on a 26.3% usage rate. Now I know I'm not trying to get too in the weeds here with some of these numbers. But I wanted to

Starting point is 00:08:01 bring those up because I thought it was very similar to Kevin McCuller. 57.1% true shooting percentage and 27.8% usage rate. So the usage rate's very similar. Kevin's is actually slightly higher. The true shooting percentage, very similar. Within half a percentage point, Kevin's slightly higher. And yes, Kevin better defender and did some other things. I'm not trying to say that he would be your Kevin McCuller next season, but point being, if Kevin McCuller would have stayed healthy, he would have been on one of

Starting point is 00:08:27 the three All-American teams. And so you have similar efficiency here to what that guy kind of put up on high volume. Now, as far as where Robinson's bread was buttered, he ranked in the 84th percentile in spot-up shooting. He went 42 of 103. That's good for 41% on spot-up threes. Very good there. 88th percentile, according to Synergy Offscreens, where he shot 40% from three. 69th percentile on catch-and-shoot threes, where he went 37% from three. He was 36% on guarded catch-and-shoot threes and 38% on unguarded catch-and- and shoot threes. Very limited attempts on this one, but 92nd percentile on small sample size of cuts. He also was in the 84th percentile on not quite as small as that sample size, but still probably overall smaller sample size, but on layups, but he was able to finish around

Starting point is 00:09:19 the rim areas where he was just kind of average or maybe not as strong. He was only in the 43rd percentile. So slightly below average there in transition play, which the reason why, though, I don't think it's because he's a bad transition player. I think he just had a bad run of shooting threes in transition. Maybe it was bad shot selection, taking, I don't know, bad shots in transition that you ended up could have maybe getting a better shot because he actually shot 68% on transition twos.

Starting point is 00:09:44 He only shot 29% on transition threes. That lowered the overall point per possession and efficiency. If you were to just shot his season average on transition threes, you know, he would have been much more efficient there. 47th percentile as a pick and roll ball handler. Wouldn't be asked to do that as much at KU, but you know, that's basically average. So 50th percentile and handoffs basically average 47th percentile on runners.

Starting point is 00:10:05 I think the summation here, though, when you go through all those stats, is that he would benefit from being more of an off-ball shooter than an on-ball guy in terms of, yes, at BYU he had to do both, but a lot of times when the shot clock was winding down, it's like, hey, you're our best pro prospect. You might be our best scorer and best player overall. Make something happen, right? At Kansas, if you were to come with the current roster that they have,

Starting point is 00:10:30 with having DeJuan Harris and Hunter Digginson and A.J. Storr and Rylan Griffin, you are playing more of an off-ball role in Zeke Mayo and all these guys, which I think would benefit everyone involved and make him a more efficient player because that's where his best kind of areas were. Now, you might be wondering about the defense. Well, according to Synergy, he did rank in the 74th percentile on defense. He was 52nd the year before. If you want another year of sample size, you're talking about good this year and basically average the year before. Now, Evan Miyakawa's website, evanmiya.com, wasn't as high on him among Big 12 players.

Starting point is 00:11:12 He was 70th there among the 119 that qualified, over 500 possessions in terms of defensive BPR. So that's slightly below average, though sometimes, I don't know, some of the defensive metrics can overvalue, undervalue team performance. And that makes it a little bit tougher to diagnose what some of these numbers mean. But I don't know if him playing a lot of the four, which he did at BYU, would have helped or hurt his defense because he's only 190 pounds. You could argue that that would make it worse. You could also argue if he's just not a great defender and he's getting to sit on guys who aren't as athletic as him. What happens if he does have to play more of the two and three? Is he not going to be able to stay in front of guys? I don't know.

Starting point is 00:11:46 But if we want to call him an average defender last year, who will be a year older, wiser, stronger, and with a good defensive coach in Bill Self if you bring him in, I think that's just fine given what this KU roster seems to be going for, which is all-out offensive assault, and he would certainly add to that. Let's talk about how he'd specifically fit in with the team on this episode of locked on Jayhawks. All right,

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Starting point is 00:13:09 free on the Google Play or App Store. Game on. How would Jackson Robinson, the BYU transfer, fit in with KU? Well, currently, if you're just talking about it from a scholarship perspective, Kansas has 11 scholarship players if you do not count Johnny Furphy and you do not count Riley Kugel who it seems like they're trying to make that work but he still hasn't officially signed if you do count Kugel you're up to 12 scholarship players if you do count Furphy you're up to 13 right so you're

Starting point is 00:13:39 somewhere between that range depending on kind of how this all goes um there was just a recent article in the Kansas City Star with Shreyas Lotto where he talked to Johnny Furphy's dad and uh you can read into that the way that you want um but you know certainly both guys with Furphy and Kugel could end up rocking a KU uniform next season and then the Jayhawks would be full at 13 but what are the odds that both are in Lawrence next season? If you were to say both are 50-50, which to be clear, I'm not convinced the Furphy one might be below 50%, but if you were to say both are 50-50,

Starting point is 00:14:16 that would mean it's only a 25% chance that you think both are with Kansas next season. And again, both those numbers might be lower. One of them might be lower, whatever it is. So you keep recruiting, and then you kind of figure it out from where you get, or you make a contingent on this or that happening. Obviously, from a game perspective, he shoots it well, shoots at high volume. He can create some off the bounce, which he had to do more for BYU

Starting point is 00:14:42 than I think ideally you'd have him at Kansas, where you would take more advantage of the shot making than the shot creation with some of the other players that you already have. But he's got good size. He's got good versatility. He's got college experience. He's got big 12 experience at this point. He's got NBA potential. He would be a very, very nice addition for KU. I think in a world where right now, say AJ Storr hypothetically wasn't committed to KU and Ryland Griffin wasn't committed to KU, we would be talking about this guy in the same tier as those guys. And there would be arguments among people saying, okay, which of those three do you want the most? Do you want Griffin most?

Starting point is 00:15:22 Do you want Storr the most? Do you want Jackson Robinson the most do you want Griffin most do you want store the most uh do you want Jackson Robinson the most and there would be certain arguments for I think each one right so I think he's kind of on that tier he's a very good player and you never say no to adding more talent and adding more wings and um obviously at this point in time with the portal kind of getting closer to closing we'll see if anything comes out in the aftermath of maybe a player leaving Kansas or anything like that. But I don't know, it makes it a little harder if it's after the portal closes for a kid to be like,

Starting point is 00:15:53 hey, I know you just brought in this guy. I might not play as much now. Well, the portal's closed. I can't really leave, which I think adds to kind of an interesting dichotomy with all this. So I think if you did add him, it would certainly lead to some very fun,

Starting point is 00:16:10 great debates that we'd have all off season long about what the starting lineup is going to look like. You know, like if you bring on Jackson Robinson, you have DeJuan Harris and Hunter Dickinson as starters. I feel like AJ Storrs is a starter. I mean, I feel like Ryland Griffin's a starter. But if you're saying that, then you're saying, okay, either Jackson Robinson's coming off the bench or KJ Adams is coming off the bench

Starting point is 00:16:31 or Zeke Mayhew's coming off the bench. Like multiple of these guys are coming off the bench, right? So it'd be quite the debate for who that starter would kind of be. Obviously, he was cool coming off the bench to some degree with BYU this past season. Now you could say, oh, well, he's transferring. So how cool was he with it? Well, that transfer came after his head coach left for Kentucky, and he was a late entry.

Starting point is 00:16:50 So clearly he was cool running it back at BYU, or at least it seems that way, if Mark Pope would have stayed at BYU, which means that maybe he would be cool coming off the bench at Kansas. And that's not the be-all, end-all, because what matters most is who's closing the game and how many minutes are you getting and what is your impact and all those sorts of things. But it does objectively make it easier if you're adding a player from the portal who can be really good, but also come off the bench because it makes it easier to make the other guys happy. For every player who is comfortable coming off the bench and making an impact there, there are guys who are going to cause problems or are going to be upset or might lead to a bit of a turmoil between them and the head coach if they are not starting. That's just how it works. So

Starting point is 00:17:36 if you have one extra player who is comfortable being in a six-man role or a seven-man role or whatever it is, and that allows somebody else to be content who needs to start, even if they're playing the same amount of minutes, or even if the starter is playing less minutes than the guy coming off the bench, like, I don't know, team chemistry matters too, right? So that would be kind of nice. But this is definitely a take for me. As we've discussed, there are different levels to the take game. There is a automatic take, figure everything out later. There is a take if something else happens there's a yeah i take but it's it's well down the list there's no takes all that sort

Starting point is 00:18:10 of stuff for me this is a take no matter what and you don't wait on things you just make this happen i know that sounds crazy because in theory if riley kugel and johnny furphy are both wearing kansas uniforms next season how do you even make this work? I don't know. I don't know. You can figure it out, though. And what are the odds of both those things happening? The way I view it, you don't want to let this one cool off

Starting point is 00:18:33 because this is a real game-changing player that would add even more shooting, even more scoring to your roster. And certainly at this point in time, Kansas is going to, based on paper, it looks like Kansas is going to be more of an offensive team than a defensive team. So maybe you would just say, hey, that's already the case. Why not add somebody who's more defensive than offensive base? I don't know. Just keep, keep steering into it and just assume that Bill Self can coach the team up to be in a top 30 defense, right? If you, if he can coach the team up to be a top 30, top 25 defense, get all the

Starting point is 00:19:01 offensive talent you can be because this past year's offense was ranked outside of the top 50. And you look at a lot of teams that went far in the NCAA tournament this year, right, with Alabama making the Final Four and Clemson had a good offense. And even some of the teams that lost in, like, the Sweet 16, that was kind of the case. UConn was just kind of a juggernaut at both. But, like, Illinois was a really good offense that wasn't as good of a defense, right?

Starting point is 00:19:23 You can go down the list. Get bucket getters, and let Bill Self figure out the scheming. So, yes, this is an automatic take for me. I think he'd be a really nice addition for KU. All right, let's talk some more about the transfer portal on this episode of Locked on Jayhawks. Game time is an authorized ticket marketplace of the NBA,

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Starting point is 00:20:40 Last minute tickets, lowest price guaranteed. So the transfer portal has officially closed, but sometimes it can take time for the paperwork to come through, for everything to work through that still have to be on a little bit of alert over the next, I would say maybe 24 hours, just to see if there's any like last minute. It's like they have that like trade deadline in the MLB and the NFL. And it's like, Oh,

Starting point is 00:21:06 the trade deadline's at three o'clock. And then all of a sudden they're like, Oh, this trade was announced. And it's like three 30. And they're like, I thought the deadline was at three. It's just because it happened.

Starting point is 00:21:14 It got processed at two 58 or whatever, but after all the paperwork and filing and making things official, it didn't get released publicly till that happened. So that is entirely possible, whether it's players from KU or other players that could be entering the portal. But for the most part, this means that we will know what Kansas is working with. We will know what is still out there, should they need to go there.

Starting point is 00:21:39 Obviously, there was some other news around the portal. Kobe Brea committing to Kentucky. Kentucky's making a bunch of moves right now in the portal. I do wonder what Jackson Robinson. Obviously, a lot of people have been connecting the dots. Hey, BYU, Mark Pope goes to Kentucky. Would he just go with him? Well, you wonder if all the commits that they've kind of brought on here,

Starting point is 00:21:58 including Kobe Brea, makes it a little less likely. Then again, Kansas has done the same thing, so I don't entirely know there. Javon Small, who we did a deep dive on yesterday, literally the day of that podcast releasing, later in the day, ended up committing to a Big 12 school, but not Kansas. Ended up committing to West Virginia, so great timing by me on that one, to say the very least.

Starting point is 00:22:18 Javon Small, though, will be playing against KU. I guess, I don't know. Is the Big 12 schedule actually out? Do we know for sure that everybody's going to play everybody in the new Big 12? I don't know. Whatever. Whatever's going to happen. I think they will.

Starting point is 00:22:28 So we will see him up close and personal for a third time. And I guess instead of you hoping that he does well for KU, you hope that he does the same that he did last year in the two games against KU when he went 4 of 20 combined in the two games. All right. That'll do it for this episode of Locked on Jayhawks. We'll be back for a Football Friday episode on next edition of the show. You can find our show anywhere you get your podcasts,

Starting point is 00:22:50 including on our YouTube page where you can like and subscribe. We'll see you next time with LOJ.

Locked On Jayhawks - Daily Podcast On Kansas Jayhawks Football & Basketball - Kansas Jayhawks Basketball Transfer Portal Target Deep Dive: BYU Wing Jaxson Robinson

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