The Kansas Jayhawks had no trouble, none at all, in a 78-41 win over the Washington State Cougars on Monday night. KU moves on to face Saint Louis in the tournament championship game. WSU will face Texas A&M in the consolation.
This was a flat-out embarrassing performance for the program. No one expected the Cougars to win in what amounted to psuedo-home game for Kansas, but some sort of fight would have been nice.
Kansas came out and destroyed a meek WSU zone, scoring on seemingly every possession in the first 10 minutes. At that point, the Cougars were at least getting something on offense to stick within 15 points of the heavily-favored Jayhawks.
Then the offensive awfulness came. The Cougars went nearly 10 minutes without points at the end of the first half and the start of the second.
Brock Motum hit a jumper to make the score 36-21 with 6:48 left to play in first. WSU would go on to score just 20 points for the rest of the game, and six of those were garbage buckets in the last two minutes. Meanwhile, Kansas continued to dominate and pull away for what will probably be their easiest win of the year.
Those first two games were a mirage. This team is getting terrible play from their guards and they can't take care of the ball, or put Motum in favorable positions to score. Shelton needs to stop dribbling, right now.
Ken Bone's choice to come out and feature a zone, which the team has looked lost in for three games, was head-scratching at best. I'm being pretty nice, there.
If things don't improve in a hurry, we might be in for a long, long season.