Shakeel Moore, the 6-foot-1, 190-pound guard from Greensboro, N.C., suffered a stress fracture in late August. Ultimately, the injury required surgery and Moore was in a boot for a little over a month. Moore eventually returned to the basketball court before KU's first exhibition of the preseason.

In three games this season, Moore has connected on 3-of-5 field goals and is 0-of-2 from behind the arc. He last took the court for Kansas back on November 19 with Bill Self’s squad played host to UNCW.

While addressing the media on Thursday, Bill Self said that Moore has returned to practice and could return to the court when No. 10 Kansas plays host to N.C. State on Saturday.

“He's practiced the last two days and looked good,” said Self. “So I don't know what his availability will be a Saturday yet, but I'm hopeful that he could be available to us.

“But still putting a guy out there that hadn't played basically in eight weeks against a really good team like North Carolina State, I don't know if that's the direction that we positively want to go, but he's trending in a way that hopefully he's going to be with us and be full speed real soon,” he added.

Coming off back-to-back road losses at Creighton and Missouri, Kansas will enter Saturday's home contest against N.C. State with an overall record of 7-2.

This season, Kansas owns victories over the likes of North Carolina, Michigan State, Duke, and Furman. Self’s squad is currently led by Hunter Dickinson (15.0), Zeke Mayo (10.9), Dajuan Harris (10.7), and KJ Adams (9.8).

However, nine games into the season and Kansas is still searching for an identity. Will the Jayhawks take a step forward in finding that identity against the Wolfpack on Saturday?

“Man, I don't know that putting it together, I don't know that there would be, can we shoot it well enough? Are we skilled enough? Are we athletic enough to become good defensively? All those things,” said Bill Self on Thursday. “But when you put it together, you're putting together potential rather than what you know to be a fact. And you can ask Fitz (Dan Fitzgerald — baseball coach) this, you recruit a guy because he can throw at 90 plus and paint the corners or whatever in a reserve role. Well, you recruit to that, but still yet, you got to actually do it against guys that are different type hitters and that kind of stuff at that moment to really know what you have. So I would say recruiting to an identity.

“I don't know that we did that as much as recruiting the pieces that we hope that when we put it all together we would be able to be a great defensive team, a great defensive rebounding team, a toughness team, a 50-50 ball team, how do you steal extra possessions type team? And I don't think that we've developed that yet,” he added.

With the pieces in place, does Self have an idea of which is most likely to come to fruition this season?

“We always tell them that we need to develop one with the hope that it better be the one that I think is the most important,” he said. “But the biggest thing to me is we've won a lot of games here when we played poorly — a lot.

“So you don't have to play great; you just got to make sure the other team doesn’t, and I think we've allowed teams to be too comfortable,” he added. “At least the last week. It wasn't that way in the other games.”