Become a better 3-point shooting team
This team had a lot of issues but many of the issues were because they weren’t able to knock down 3-point shots consistently. Bill Self always has preferred to have two big lineups and, coming into the season, he thought they would be able to run those often. But after injuries and suspensions, they were unable to do so.
Kansas has had small lineups the past few seasons so you’d think they would be able to handle it again, but this team wasn’t close to as good offensively as those teams were. The majority of the players weren’t even on the prior teams. The only players who finished the season for Kansas that played for the Jayhawks in a prior season were Mitch Lightfoot and Marcus Garrett.
They had guys on the roster this season who can knock down shots. They didn’t have great shooters, but they should’ve been a much better 3-point shooting team than they were. Quentin Grimes and Ochai Agbaji were two guys who showed they can be good shooters, but they weren’t nearly as consistent as they needed to be.
Other guys, such as Devon Dotson and Dedric Lawson, were good shooters but that wasn’t the focus of their game at all. You need guys who can be relied upon to knock down the 3-point shots every game. They need a guy who will take and make a lot of them each game. They also need the team as a whole to improve from there.
If you can knock down 3-point jumpers, it opens up so much for the rest of the offense. You also have the other side of that in that if you have guys who can dominate inside then you will get more open looks for the rest of the team. If you’re able to hit 3-pointers, it can give the offense as a whole a better rhythm to it.
When your offense as a whole is improved, you won’t feel pressured into taking some of the chances they did this season. If you can rely on guys to hit contested 3-pointers, then that can be a part of the offense and could replace some of the mistakes they made this season when they had to force passes inside and such.
With the way the game of basketball is going, you have to be able to knock down 3-point shots consistently. So many teams play run-and-gun and shoot a lot of threes and if your team can’t do that, then sometimes they struggle to keep up on the scoreboard. That’s exactly how the Jayhawks season ended against Auburn so they need to improve in that area if they want to take the next step going into next season.