Kansas coach Bill Self said Monday that Darryn Peterson has looked good in practice while coming back from a hamstring injury, but he won’t know until Tuesday whether the star freshman will be available when the No. 21 Jayhawks play fifth-ranked UConn at Allen Fieldhouse that night.
Peterson played the first two games of the season, a blowout of Green Bay and a loss at North Carolina, but has missed the past six contests. That includes a loss to Duke at Madison Square Garden in New York, and three games last week at the Players Era Festival in Las Vegas, where the Jayhawks still managed to go 3-0 over power conference schools.
“He has practiced, and he’s gone up and down,” Self said Monday. “The hesitancy I have is that before we’ll announce anything, he has to test out medically from a strength and flexibility standpoint, and we’ll know that in the morning.”
Self did acknowledge, “If he plays, he’s starting.”
Peterson was widely considered the nation’s No. 1 recruit coming out of high school, and many NBA mock drafts have pegged the 6-foot-5 guard as the first pick for the June draft. Peterson has flashed that potential in limited chances, scoring 21 points in 22 minutes against Green Bay and 22 points in 28 minutes against the Tar Heels.
He also gives Kansas something it has missed: a player who can create for himself when offense breaks down.
“He’s a scoring threat, you know, when he has the ball,” Self said, before adding: “All of our guys have done great, so I’m not going to in any way, shape or form take away from how hard they are trying, and what they’ve tried to do. We’ve had guys step up.”
In fact, Self said it could be “a blessing” that Peterson has had to miss games when the end of the year rolls around.
Without him in the lineup, sophomore forward Flory Bidunga has flourished into a game-changer under the rim, and newcomers such as Melvin Council Jr., Tre White and Bryson Tiller have had starring turns in a 6-2 start to the season.
“We’ve forced other guys to be aggressive, and now he’s coming back, we may be more apt to play off him and play with him from an aggressive standpoint,” Self said, “as opposed to passing and watching him go make plays. It could be a silver lining.”
Peterson’s return also could make it hard for UConn, or Missouri or NC State coming up, to properly scout the Jayhawks, because the offensive and defensive sets that other teams have been able to use against them will have become largely useless.
“There’s a lot of things that have been positive about how we’ve played,” Self said, “but the biggest thing that I thought was positive is that we actually guarded and rebounded, and if you do those two things, you can be in most games. Even when our offense was stale, which it was, and will be until get total rhythm and continuity, if you can defend and rebound you still got a shot.”
Without Peterson, Kansas briefly fell out of the top 25 in week 4 after starting the season as the No. 19 team. They returned to the top 25 on Monday, jumping to No. 21, following wins against Notre Dame and Syracuse – four spots ahead of where they were in the poll when Peterson first went down with a hamstring injury.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Want great stories delivered right to your inbox? Create or log in to your FOX Sports account, and follow leagues, teams and players to receive a personalized newsletter daily!
