The Kansas basketball team is loaded with seniors, post-graduate players, and others with extra seasons due to COVID-19. Hunter Dickinson, Dajuan Harris, KJ Adams, Zeke Mayo, Shakeel Moore, and David Coit will all be gone from the roster after this season. Flory Bidunga, Rakease Passmore, Elmarko Jackson, Jamari McDowell, Zach Clemence, Noah Shelby, AJ Storr, and Rylan Griffen are the holdovers.
Head coach Bill Self has already added Darryn Peterson, Samis Calderon, and Bryson Tiller (who is already enrolled) for the 2025 season. On paper, this gives KU 11 players for next year, but this is the era of the transfer portal, and it is hard to imagine what the roster will look like in August.
The most interesting question is how many of those eight players on the current roster will be retained. Jackson and McDowell had rough freshman campaigns, but both showed enough to see promising futures for both. Passmore has shown glimpses of what he might develop into through this season. Bidunga has been getting better and better as the season progresses. There might be a chance he jumps to the pro level next year, based on his upside, but offensively, he is still raw and could use another season or two at Kansas to hone his skills with the ball.
After transferring to Kansas, Shelby redshirted this season, so no one has seen anything of him, and Clemence, who is currently injured, offers frontline depth. The remaining players on the list of underclassmen are probably the two most significant question marks, too.
Can Bill Self retain AJ Storr and Rylan Griffen for next year's Kansas basketball roster?
It hasn’t gone as well for Griffen and Storr as most anticipated. Both have struggled both offensively and defensively in Self’s system. While they've had nice moments and games, but they’ve been few and far between. Will either want to stay after this season?
There are still two months left for things to start clicking for them. Over the last two games, each had a game that illustrated why they are playing for the Jayhawks. Against TCU, Storr scored 12 points on 6 for 10 shooting, with six rebounds, while Griffen hit five three-pointers in the crushing loss to Houston.
Self needs to draw more front these two down the stretch if the Jayhawks are to advance very far in the NCAA Tournament. KU needs them to perform well. Self also needs them to play well enough that he wants them to stay for their senior seasons and that they want to stay. Relying too much on the portal has been a mixed bag for Kansas. It’s hard for players to jump into Self’s system and fully appreciate the pressures of playing for the Jayhawks. It takes time.
It would be better to have these two veterans on the roster next year instead of going back to the transfer portal for depth and having to hope whoever you bring will have any more luck than Storr and Griffen had in grasping the system as soon as they need to. Storr and Grigin will already have that year under their belt and would probably do better than whoever replaces them out of the portal.
Self recruited them for a reason, and it would be fantastic if he didn’t have to add Storr and Griffen to the list of players he needs to replace. Keep them in-house, and they can be the veteran leaders next season. It would be a win-win for the Jayhawks and the players.