This wasn't an easy game to pick out one big play where a Jayhawk left some memorable skin on the court, so I'm picking a player who left the biggest mark on this game; Joel Embiid.
I'm not sure I ever remember a Jayhawk team fighting so hard to feed the 5 during the Bill Self era at Kansas. Finally, we are getting a better taste of what Joel can do on offense. Finally, we are able to experience our offense execute a real plan, and the plan is what we've all come to expect with Bill Self; feed the post. Run our offense through the post and open up our perimeter after establishing the post. That is exactly what happened, and I'm not sure we've seen our offense run this well all year! At times our offense looked effortless.
It seems that Joel Embiid leaves a bigger mark on every additional game he plays in. Against TCU it was obvious when Joel was on the court and when he wasn't. The game always made a huge shift every time he entered or exited it.
His stat line was solid; 14 points off of 4-of-8 shooting, 6 rebounds, 2 assists, 1 steal, 3 blocks and perhaps 3 dozen shot adjustments by TCU... all in only 19 minutes of play!
Because of the light switch impact Joel had on this game (on and off), he deserves to win the FLOOR BURN AWARD! And it didn't hurt that Joel played with enough basketball IQ to draw Shepherd's 5th foul on a charge call!
And kudos to Andrew Wiggins for finally figuring out where his scoring opportunities exist... mostly somewhere between the 3-pt line and before the rim. His pull-up jumpers were flawless! This is where his future bread-n-butter is and he might as well start garnering the benefits from it now!
And a shout out to Landen Lucas who, once again, gave us solid minutes that didn't require him "knocking off the rust" first. He represents so much of our future because he'll be involved for 5 years!
Conference Season Tally:
Joel Embiid 2
Wayne Selden 2
Frank Mason 1
Andrew Wiggins 1
Naadir Tharpe 1
Tarik Black 1
