Kansas Jayhawks to wrap up rugged stretch against North Carolina’s Triangle teams
After defeating North Carolina and Duke by a combined total of six points, Kansas’ men’s basketball team Saturday will play its third Triangle school in 36 days.
North Carolina State, a team that reached the Final Four last season and has won two NCAA Tournament titles to Duke’s six and UNC’s five, will visit Allen Fieldhouse for a 2:15 p.m. tip.
The game will be shown live on ESPN.
“I don’t think from a scheduling standpoint it’s the brightest thing that anybody has done for their respective programs over time. So I’ll blame that on our scheduling czar and not me,” KU coach Bill Self said jokingly Thursday at a news conference held in advance of the game between the No. 10-ranked (7-2) Jayhawks and unranked (7-3) Wolfpack.
Self, KU’s 22nd-year coach, annually embraces a difficult schedule — one that’ll be even more challenging during the 2025-26 season when the Jayhawks travel to UNC and N.C. State to complete home-and-home contract agreements and also play Duke’s Blue Devils in the Champions Classic in New York.
“I actually think it’s a great schedule and I like it but it’s hard,” Self said of the 2024-25 nonconference slate. KU also has defeated Michigan State and dropped a pair of road contests to Missouri and Creighton.
“What people don’t understand is the Creighton and the Missouri games are really hard games to go along with the other games. So I’m amazed sometimes that when something happens early in the season, people will say, ‘Well, that team may not be as good.’
“And here you are looking at Houston, they’ve got three losses already — to Auburn (74-69), San Diego State (73-70, OT) and Alabama (85-80, OT) — and two of them on the last possession and overtime against two teams that can win the national championship. And the third is against a really good team that just went to the Final Four two years ago. So a national championship game.
“Those are the things that are kind of misleading with our schedule. Our schedule’s been great, but N.C. State’s going to be a really hard game,” Self added.
Eighth-year N.C. State coach Kevin Keatts leads a Wolfpack team that’s coming off back-to-back victories over Coppin State (66-56) and Florida State (84-74, OT). Before that, NC State had lost three straight: to Purdue (71-61) and BYU (72-61), at a tournament in San Diego, and to Texas in Raleigh (63-59).
“They are very athletic and they play a lot like Mizzou as far as switch to deny and pressing,” Self said. KU had 22 turnovers in Sunday’s 76-67 loss to the Tigers at Mizzou Arena.
“And although Missouri didn’t press, they pressured. I think that N.C. State may press a little bit more than Missouri did against us, but certainly they’re going to pressure and can we handle that and can we get open one pass away and can we play behind their initial pressure, something we didn’t do very well at all on Sunday,” Self stated.
For N.C. State, senior guard Marcus Hill averages a team-leading 13.0 points per game. Senior guard Jayden Taylor averages 12.5 points a game with a team-leading 14 steals in 10 games. Senior wing Dontrez Styles averages 10.6 points and 4.6 rebounds.
Senior forward Ben Middlebrooks leads the team with 16 blocked shots. He has 12 steals and averages 9.2 points and 4.3 rebounds per contest. The team’s leading rebounder is senior forward Brandon Huntley-Hatfield, who has grabbed 5.6 boards a game while chipping in 8.7 points per contest.
“What jumps out to me,” Self said, “is they can get their own shot and they’re very quick and athletic. They’ve got a good looking roster. I’ll be honest with you too, I thought Missouri had a great looking roster. I thought their personnel was tall, long, athletic. I thought they had a good roster too. And this team reminds me a lot of Mizzou.”
As far as the Jayhawks, they’ll be trying to snap their two-game nonconference losing streak. KU will complete the nonconference slate on Dec. 22 against Brown.
“I think attitudes are good and they are trying hard and we had a really good day yesterday and hopefully we will do some things obviously a lot better than what we did for 25 minutes on Sunday. That was awful,” Self said Thursday referring to the MU game. “But the guys didn’t lay down. They didn’t quit, fought back (from 24-point deficit), cut it to two and had some things not go right doing that, but still cut it to two. By no means is that a moral victory by any stretch, but it was at least something that we can draw from that was positive on that particular day.
“The bottom line is what we have told them (players) is it is not close to being where we want it to be, but it’s not near as bad as the way you feel it is. And we’ve got time. We’ve got three weeks before conference play starts that we need to be get a lot better in certain things, but certainly to get a little bit better in what we already know, what we should be doing,” Self added.
At Saturday’s game, both teams will be recognizing Hoops4ALS. The teams will be wearing ALS shooting shirts and the coaching staffs will be wearing ALS lapel pins. For more information: Hoops4ALS.com.
This story was originally published December 13, 2024 at 10:28 AM with the headline "Kansas Jayhawks to wrap up rugged stretch against North Carolina’s Triangle teams."
