KJ Adams put together perhaps his best performance of the year against Connecticut, scoring 18 points and five rebounds. The performance from Adams comes as he gets ready to head back to Austin, Texas as he gets ready for his mother’s funeral, who passed away just before the Maui Invitational.
“He was playing for a lot more than Kansas tonight, but I thought KJ was great,” head coach Bill Self said.
The energy from Adams was infectious on his teammates who from the first basket he scored, to the game-sealing free throws. His teammates say that the energy is infectious, and claim that when Adams gets excited, it helps their game as well.
“When he's fist pumping and dunking putting his head on the rim that turns me up,” Kevin McCullar said.
Adams helping out his team’s energy on the court goes a long way, but he has been on the receiving end of help from his teammates off the court recently.
“My teammates really just helped me a lot,” Adams said. “I feel like they've been here for a lot for me, coach has made a lot of stuff really easy for me. I feel like just having the Jayhawk nation and everybody in my inner circle just hone in and be with me, it really means a lot and it's really special and helps me during rough times like these.”
He said that he played one of his best games of the year against the Huskies, and it certainly showed on the stat sheet. However, McCullar and Hunter Dickinson can recognize his impact in every game, whether the numbers pop out or not.
“Every game he’s out there if he's affecting the stat sheet or not,” McCullar said. “He's doing so many things to help us win so you don't really got to pay attention to the stat sheet.”
“You can't really put him in any position, he's just a basketball player,” Dickinson said. “He does everything good and you know he's like a Swiss army knife he's able to do so many different things for us.”
Where Adams really stuck out tonight was on the defensive end. The Jayhawks switched everything one through four, leaving him in tricky situations as consistently as he is being asked to guard point guards. Self knows that Adams’ physical strength is what allows him to be so impactful on the defensive end.
“The thing about KJ defensively is he's so strong he's hard to screen, and if you do screen him, he’s going to run through it,” Self said. “We don't have anybody else that really has that physical capability to do that, but yeah he was a problem tonight.”
Self recognized that Adams was playing with a heavy heart and was on the verge of tears when he was addressing the team after the performance.
“This game belonged to one person, and he’s sitting right there,” Self said. “Can you imagine the stress he’s been under and for him to play for you guys the way that he did tonight knowing he’s getting on a plane to go say goodbye tomorrow morning at 11 a.m. Wow. Stud.”
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