Kansas Basketball: 2020-21 takeaways from home win over West Virginia

The Jayhawks found Sean McNeil in the second half

Going into Tuesday’s contest, West Virginia’s Sean McNeil was averaging 10 points per game and had yet to surpass 16 points in a contest. Against Kansas, McNeil netted 20 points in the first 20 minutes of action and went a perfect 6-6 from three and 7-7 from the field.

This may be debatable, but in my opinion, McNeil notched the easiest 20 points that he’ll probably ever score. While the last three-pointer that McNeil attempted (and banked in) was heavily contested, the majority of his threes came after a Kansas defender lost track of where he was (or just forgot that they were guarding a shooter), and had to surrender an open triple.

If you need me to give you a prime example of this, I will just go to the 12:00 mark of the first half, when Bryce Thompson had a defensive lapse that caused him to give up three points. Essentially, as Gabe Osabuohien was attacking Mitch Lightfoot off the dribble, Thompson got caught watching his progress, which allowed McNeil to slide down to the left corner from the left-wing, and knock down a moving three.

Need another example of this? No problem, at the 2:30 mark of the first half Ochai Agbaji decided to fall asleep for a second, and leave McNeil alone in the left corner. When Gabe Osabuohien caught the ball on the right elbow, Agbaji immediately moved toward the middle of the paint (so that he could provide assistance to Mitch Lightfoot), but failed to realize that McNeil was by himself in the left corner, which resulted in McNeil receiving a pass from Osabuohien, and then netting his 17th point of the game.

The Jayhawks must have paid attention to Bill Self’s halftime speech because as soon as the second half began, the Jayhawks stuck to McNeil on every possession. When the Mountaineers tried to run McNeil off of screens to help free him up, the Jayhawks stayed with him and forced him to put the ball on the floor more times than he would have liked.

When a Jayhawk defender was guarding McNeil (and McNeil didn’t have the ball), they did not sag off of him and were content with allowing David McCormack to repeatedly contest shots at the rim.

Kansas’ second-half adjustments clearly worked, because McNeil scored just four points in the final 20 minutes of action, and failed to connect on a three. When you are playing basketball, and one player has just torched you and your team for an entire half, you have two main options.

One, you can choose to point fingers and argue with one another (but not solve the issue at hand), or two, you can come together and figure out how to slow the player down in the second half of the contest.

I think because the Jayhawks chose the latter, they were able to make McNeil less effective in half #2 and keep him in check for 20 straight minutes. This may not have been the main reason why the Jayhawks came out victorious on Tuesday, but it certainly played a huge role in Kansas’ stellar second-half performance.