Kansas basketball: Best KU players each season since 2000

2019 – Udoka Azubuike

This is one of the toughest years to choose a singular player as the best. Devon Dotson was the leading scorer and first-team All-American. Udoka Azubuike was a second-team All-American, Big 12 Player of the Year, and Wooden Award finalist. It’s about as close to a tossup as you can get. In the end, I decided to go with the player that was simply unstoppable more often than not. When Dok was on his game, there was nothing the other team could do. He could dunk it through multiple defenders on one end and block handfuls of shots (multiple blocks in 20 of 31 games) at the other end. This is probably quite hyperbolic, but he had a bit of Shaq to his game in the way that he could physically dominate whoever was wearing a jersey that didn’t match his own.