Locked On Jayhawks - Daily Podcast On Kansas Jayhawks Football & Basketball - KJ Adams Headlines Top Things to Monitor for Kansas Jayhawks Basketball in Three Puerto Rico Games

Episode Date: August 3, 2023

Top players like KJ Adams, Hunter Dickinson, Kevin McCullar and Elmarko Jackson to monitor their play in Kansas Jayhawks Basketball's three games in KU's Puerto Rico trip. What team takeaways can we have for Bill Self's team and what will we not learn from the games against the Puerto Rico select team and the Bahamian National Team possibly featuring DeAndre Ayton and Buddy Hield.Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors!LinkedInLinkedIn Jobs helps you find the qualified candidates you want to talk to, faster. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/LOCKEDONCOLLEGE. Terms and conditions apply.eBay MotorsFor parts that fit, head to eBay Motors and look for the green check. Stay in the game with eBay Guaranteed Fit. eBay Motors dot com. Let’s ride. eBay Guaranteed Fit only available to US customers. Eligible items only. Exclusions apply.FanDuelMake Every Moment More. Don’t miss the chance to get your No Sweat First Bet up to TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS in Bonus Bets when you go FanDuel.com/LOCKEDON.FANDUEL DISCLAIMER: 21+ in select states. First online real money wager only. Bonus issued as nonwithdrawable free bets that expires in 14 days. Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit FanDuel.com/RG (CO, IA, MD, MI, NJ, PA, IL, VA, WV), 1-800-NEXT-STEP or text NEXTSTEP to 53342 (AZ), 1-888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org/chat (CT), 1-800-9-WITH-IT (IN), 1-800-522-4700 (WY, KS) or visit ksgamblinghelp.com (KS), 1-877-770-STOP (LA), 1-877-8-HOPENY or text HOPENY (467369) (NY), TN REDLINE 1-800-889-9789 (TN) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On today's Locked on Jayhawks, KU starts their trip to Puerto Rico. They've got three games starting on Thursday morning. We're going to discuss what to watch for. Players most excited to see all that and plenty more on this edition of Locked on Jayhawks. 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. You can hear me as well, Monday through Friday from 3 to 6 p.m.

on KLWN in Lawrence with Rock Chalk Sports Talk. Thanks for making Locked On Jayhawks your first listen every Every day we are free and available wherever you get any of your podcasts. And on today's edition of the show, we're talking KU basketball trip to Puerto Rico. They've got three games scheduled. We're going to talk about players most excited to see during the trip, things about the team most excited to see, team questions that maybe will and won't be answered over the course of this trip. Hold on, today's edition of Locked on Jayhawks.

Let's start with the what real quick, though. They're going to be playing at Ruben Rodriguez Coliseum. It's located in Puerto Rico. All three games are going to be aired on the Jayhawk radio network, so you can actually hear all three games on KLWN and 105.9 KISS in the Lawrence, Kansas City areas, or with klwn.com, 105.9kiss.com if you're on a stream for it. Thursday is the first game.

That is at 11 a.m. Central Time. It will have a 10.30 pregame with tip for 11 against the Puerto Rico select team. And then the final two games are both going to be against the Bohemian national team, which the first of those will be on Saturday, August 5th with pregame at 3.30 tip time at four o'clock. And then August 7th is Monday at 10.30 pregame, 11 a.m. tip time again against the Bahamian national team. The Bahamian national team, very interesting.

I think they released the roster last night. There are a lot of players who, like Clay Thompson could have played. I didn't see him on the roster. But still, they have some NBA pros and very good NBA players that are on the roster. DeAndre Ayton, Michael Thompson, Clay Thompson's brother, Buddy Heald. I think Bill Self talked about this at his last media availability that, you know, Buddy Heald gave Kansas 46 points in Allen Fieldhouse. It's been, what, seven years since then? You know,

he's seven years better. He's an NBA pro and he already gave them 46 in the Fieldhouse, right? So clearly this is going to be a challenge when you have to play in that type of situation. On the flip side though, that makes it very interesting that if KU performs well or is playing against one of those individual players, it could mean even more about how good that player is, right? If Hunter Dickinson is going against DeAndre Ayton and Dickinson goes for 20 and 12 against Ayton man that is uh going to be darn impressive if something like that were to happen so I'm actually all for I I want KU to play the best competition there with Buddy Heald and Hunter Dickinson to where yeah even if they lose by 20 points because they're playing you know this team of NBA pros but you have some individual standouts

against really good players that gives you an idea of how good these players are that's one of the things if you're doing practices against each other, if one player plays well against your other player, does that mean that one of the players is really good, or does that mean one of the players isn't up to snuff, or where does it kind of lie in that regard? So you want kind of the best competition there. We'll see what happens.

I think Henry Greenstein of the Lawrence Journal World pointed out that the Bahamian national team is set to play, it's something like four games over the two days that they're supposed to be playing the Kansas team. I think they play like LSU, like a couple hours afterwards, which probably tells you they're going to be splitting up the teams, right? They have a big roster. So maybe they're going to split it up into two teams of whatever it is, two teams of eight or two teams of 10 to where one team's going to play one, one team's going to play the other. And if that happens, we'll see how the talent gets divvied out and who exactly Kansas would

be playing against. Who are the players that I'm most excited to see in this event, though? Number one for me has got to be KJ Adams. With KJ Adams, you know that he is a very talented player. He is somebody that Bill Self trusts. He was the Big 12 Most Improved Player a season ago. But in terms of K.J. Adams, you know, what is it going to look like this year in a different role?

You were playing as a five-man a year ago, an undersized five-man, but it kind of fit some of your skill set well because, you know, you didn't have the outside shooting game. Now, there are certain things that K.J. does does well as a wing like he is athletic like a wing um I don't know that I'd call him like uh his dribbling ability wing like but it's definitely better than a center there's a little there but a is able to throw out the lineup of Hunter Dickinson and KJ Adams is just going to be dependent on how well they play together. And a lot of that is going to be on KJ to where how can you adjust playing next to this guy with Hunter Dickinson?

Because the orbit of the KU offense is going to be centering around Hunter Dickinson. So it's how are you going to fit in next to him? If it doesn't fit in long term, do we see a starting lineup eventually down the road of Kevin McCuller at the four where you bring in an extra guard one through three? Entirely possible later in the season if it's not working with KJ at the four and Hunter Dickinson at the five. So part of that could be dependent. But with KJ, I don't think we're going to see a big three-point game.

It will be interesting to watch if there is any three-point game. Does he have any confidence out there? How does the shot look? Is he taking them? But also, I think I've heard more about him progressing from his mid-range shooting, where I'll be interested to see how many of those mid-range shots do we see from KJ. How much are you able to flex out Hunter Dickinson offensively with his ability to be, you know, in the high post or from three to where it's able to have KJ Adams down low on the offensive

end? How much are you able to kind of invert those two guys? And, you know, beyond that for KJ, like, what does it look like as more of a wing with those dribbling and passing abilities? What if he's just this elite driver of the basketball? You've got a smaller player on you now. You have enough dribbling and straight line drive ability. What if he's just an elite driver of the basketball that if somebody does sag off of him, he's

able to attack them straight and get that running start and be unstoppable in that regard. That could clearly be something that happens. And then you also are curious on the whole talk about, well, KJ, good offensive rebounder, struggled on the defensive end rebounding. Having Hunter Dickinson, that kind of boxed out the opposing five man, will that help KJ as a rebounder? Will he be a good offensive rebounder? That this will be a good rebounding team?

So I think most of the lineups, the starting lineups, the questions, what is he going to look like, all this stuff, it does center around KJ Adams, which is why he's the player I'm most excited to watch. I have two others in my top three here. Number two is Hunter Dickinson. I think everybody's just excited to see Hunter Dickinson playing in a KU uniform. We all have high expectations on what that's going to look like, but it's one of those fun things where you're just excited to actually see it for the first time. And then the third guy here is El Marco Jackson, who heard really good things about so far that he's been really

impressive. Like he's arguably been one of the better newcomers so far for KU among freshmen and transfers. And if that's the case, when you look at the shooting guard battle for the starting shooting guard, it's all newcomers with Artario Morris, Nick Timberlake, and Elmarco Jackson to where could he be the other starter? Part of it could be, you know, you go with the starter based on fit, right? Do you go with Nick Timberlake just because you want to add the shooting? Do you go with Artario Morris because he's kind of probably the happy medium between Elmarco Jackson and Nick Timberlake in terms of shooting and ball handling?

Or do you go with the pure athlete and maybe the best overall player with Elmarco Jackson? But I want to see what he looks like because the athleticism is off the charts. I want to see it against another team and see what he can do in terms of some of the other stuff of the game. I'll throw out an honorable mention there. Kevin McCullers jump shot with Kevin overall. We heard the comments from Bill Self about him, you know, maybe being the team's best player. So, you know, you want to see what that looks like.

I would imagine if that's the case, the jump shots got to be improved. Nick Timberlake mentioned him as one of the better jump shooters on the team, better three point shooters on the team. So maybe that that level of three point shooting has increased for Kevin Kohler. I want to see what it looks like in game scenario, because if it is, that very much changes the precipice for this Kansas team. All right, let's get on to some team questions that could and could not be answered based on what's probably going to happen this weekend or I guess over the next week and a half with the Puerto Rico trip.

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Okay, so team questions that could and could not be answered over the course of this next week with the three games in Puerto Rico I go back to the KJ Adams Hunter Dickinson thing two big lineups some questions about you know how they could fit together how do they play together and how do they look in terms of spacing getting everybody else working are there more high low concepts back to Bill Self's time earlier on at Kansas and with Illinois? Do they have some of that stuff thrown in? How do they play together? How do they fit? That's going to be a big question here. And the biggest part of this

is KJ Adams with Hunter Dickinson. That'll be the one that's on the floor for the most minutes. I would even go beyond that in terms of some of the two big lineups. Do we see any two big lineups of Parker Brown playing next to Hunter Dickinson to maybe get Parker Brown more minutes? So far, everything I've heard has been impressive with Parker Brown and what he's brought to the table for this team. Is that enough to get him even more minutes and play him at the four? He's about a career 28% three-point shooter.

So, you know, if you more so view offensively Hunter Dickinson as the four, as being a better three-point shooter, but you still get some three-point shooting with Parker Brown at the five, maybe you can make that work. And I guess, honestly, if, you know, you've heard Bill Self mention that Parker Brown is actually a better athlete than Christian Brown. I don't know if that was in jest or what.

I forget what other player mentioned, though, that Parker Brown is a very good athlete. So, theoretically, if you're comfortable with playing KJ Adams next to Hunter Dickinson and Parker Brown is a very good athlete, but Parker Brown actually has more of a, I don't know, set in stone or proven three-point game than KJ Adams, albeit not a great three-point game, it is more proven than KJ Adams, then why couldn't we see Parker Brown next to Hunter Dickinson if we are going to see KJ next to Hunter Dickinson? Now, maybe the part with KJ is it's just, hey,

we're just trying to get our five best players on the floor, and that involves KJ and Hunter. And so we're willing to make whatever we have to do work in terms of how we play. Whereas with Parker Brown, he's not one of our five best players, so we're not going to just make it work with a two-big-week lineup in that regard but I don't know I think there is some logic there that you could say if you're comfortable playing KJ Adams at the four maybe you could play Parker Brown next to Hunter Dickinson I'll be interested to see that because

if we don't see it in this event because this event you know as much as Bill Self goes with the guys he trusts in this event he probably will be a little more loose on that though you know it's impossible to fully uh get away from from kind of your identity there if we don't see it in this event we probably won't see it moving forward but i'll be interested to see if we do uh who's the fifth starter is another thing that we're going to learn at least right now this won't necessarily be indicative of who's going to be the fifth starter at the end of the year who's going to be the fifth starter once we get to that point of the start of the season and the season tips off. But it'll give us a real insight of who is

the fifth starter right now. And then we'll be able to use that as a data point to be like, okay, well, over the course of from after the Puerto Rico trip to the start of the season, late night, all that stuff, we've heard that this player's improved or this player has performed well. And we'll be able to use that and say, okay, well, this player's performed well, and he was already the fifth starter. So obviously he'll be that fifth starter, right? It'll be a good data point for us along the way. So could it be, basically it's the shooting guard, right? Could it be Arterio Morris? Could it be Nick Timberlake? Could it be DeJuan Harris? In the case of Timberlake, I think that would tell you that they really care about the floor spacing and three-point shooting. If it's on Marco Jackson,

I think it's just because he's probably the best player there. If it's Arterio Morris, then I think that would be big for him because Arterio has probably missed some practices and scrimmages because of the whole off-the-court stuff and the court case going on that's forced him to go down back into the state of Texas Texas and if he's already the starter with some missed time and he's gonna have more time to catch up in some of those practices then maybe that speaks very highly in that regard and then the last question that I think we will get answered a little bit is how athletic do they look overall right um you know with DeJuan Harris I think good athlete like solid athlete for a point guard not a crazy athlete Kevin McCuller good athlete not a crazy athlete um

Hunter Dickinson again like he's more of a your big man center like you're not going to look at him to be super athletic or anything like that like Nick Timberlake I think uh is a good athlete um he's got some of that dunk package and stuff, but he's not, again, this stupendous athlete. So what is all that going to look like when you do mix it with, okay, KJ Adams is a great athlete. Artario Morselle, Marco Jackson seem to be great athletes. Parker Brown, again, we just talked about,

sounds like he's a great athlete. Could be an interesting mix of athletic versus more skilled type of players, and I'm interested to see how that blends together and how athletic this team can be. You know, we've seen the last couple of years, KU wasn't the most athletic team the last couple of years. They were an athletic team, but not the most. And when they did play some of the more athletic teams, it did cause them problems at times. So I'll be interested to see how that goes against, like, if you're going to be playing the Bohemian national team, you would think that's going to be a very athletic team.

Let's finish up with Locked on Jayhawks. Things that we don't think we'll learn or we won't get questions answered to as part of this trip in Puerto Rico with LOJ. All right, team questions that I don't think will be answered as part of this trip to Puerto Rico, things that we won't have ironed out. Obviously, like I said, with the fifth starter thing, I think it'll be a data point. I don't think we'll securely know.

If Nick Timberlake starts all the games, if Artario Morris or El Marco Jackson start all the games, we're not going to be able to just say, okay, well, that's it. That's clearly the starter headed into the season. It's just a data point. It would be right now that would be the starter. But there still at that point would be two, three months before the start of the year for practices and things to iron themselves out so it'll give us a data point it'll give us a learning situation but it

won't give us a definitive answer on who the fifth starter is even though it'll maybe give us a hint on who is leading that race to this point in time I don't think we're gonna we're gonna find out if Jamari McDowell is gonna redshirt based off this trip. If he performs well, if he doesn't, I don't think that's going to signal it one way or another. I think part of that is just going to be dependent on can KU add another roster player, if not two, to where you can afford to redshirt him. Because if you do redshirt him and Zach Clements, that leaves you eight scholarship players, which in theory, having eight scholarship players for a Bill Self rotation that's only going to be seven or eight guys,

that is fine, but then you're SOL in case of foul trouble or injury, and you're not going to do that to yourself. So it's kind of more dependent on that. But if Jamari McDowell, I guess, just goes off in all the games, then maybe we rediscover where his know, where his role in the rotation and things could be, and maybe that avoids it from it. But overall, I think it's kind of more dependent on outside stuff, like bringing in those other roster players that I don't think we're necessarily going to learn this week. I think how good the team is, is going to be

something that you're not really going to learn this week, right? They could blow out the Puerto Rico select team. They could get blown out by the Bohemian national team. I don't know. They could lose all three, whatever it is. Like we don't really know the competition there. And especially with the Bohemian national team, you're going to know some of the competition NBA guys to where if you lose, it's not going to be a big deal, right? It's not going to be a huge deal if you lose to Buddy Heald who scored 50 points in DeAndre Ayton, right? It was just unstoppable inside. It's not. So if they lose by 20 or 30, there's not going to really be any takeaways about like, oh, this team's not good or whatever. It's like,

okay, well, they're playing a team of pros. On the flip side, if they win that game against the, you know, Bohemian National Team, maybe that says something about how good they are. But then again, what if it's like, ah, they only played Buddy Heald for 12 minutes just to get them some run and DeAndre Ayton only played 15 minutes or just didn't even play in the game altogether. Um, and we don't really know about some of the other players on the roster and what if they're just not that good, right? It's going to be hard to have overwhelming takeaways in terms of the

team aspect. How good are they at this and that? And I think to that regard, like I'm not really concerned about the results. I'm more so focusing in on certain individual performers than I am the team results in this type of event. Now, maybe you can say if they have enough good individual performers, the team results will come. I don't know. It's just tough to tell with because you don't have the the idea of, oh, this competition

is a top 25 team in college basketball. This would be the number one team in college basketball. This would be the number 100 team. It's hard to have that comparison of what exactly it would be so i don't know that i'm really viewing much from the the team result um kind of side of it and honestly like to that regard some of the team stuff that happens in this game it might be hard to have takeaways like if they have a an insane rebounding margin in over the course of three games could it just be a three game sample size? Like what if they shoot extremely poorly from three?

What if they shoot 25% from three over the three games? Is it mean that they're a bad three point shooting team? Or does it mean that it's just a small sample size and they had a bad three game stretch? Or what if they shoot really well? What if they shoot 45% from three over three games? Again, small sample size. Does it mean they're good? So I don't know how much you can take away from the team aspect, but individual players, I think that's where you can have more of your takeaways in this event. All right, that's going to do it for locked on Jayhawks. You can give me

a shout. If you have any questions at the Johnson radio on Twitter, you can find our podcast wherever you get any of your podcasts with locked on Jayhawks. You can also find us like, and subscribe to the show on YouTube. See you next time with LOJ.