Wednesday, December 31, 2008
The Morris twins couldn’t escape from the comments about Arizona. Family and friends dished them out over the holidays. Even at Christmas dinner. That loss really hurt, they would tell Marcus and Markieff.
“It made my Christmas worse than it really was,” freshman forward Marcus Morris said.
It was Winter Break. They wanted to relax. They only had three days to do it, and they didn’t want to dwell on something from the past that would only make them upset.
After all, Marcus says “if you dwell on the past, you don’t know what’s ahead of you.” And he was looking ahead to a strange thing: practice. Actually, all the Jayhawks were. Cole Aldrich and Tyrel Reed both admitted they wanted to get back to Lawrence as soon as possible.
The excitement helped. From December 27 to Tuesday night’s 79-43 victory against Albany, the players and Kansas coach Bill Self said they practiced as well as they had all year. More than that, the players thought practice had been more enjoyable than at any point of the season.
It was a bit surprising. Practices during Winter Break are usually the worst. There’s no school, so there’s no time limit. For players, that means suicide running drills. That means new plays. That means marathon film sessions.
That usually means pain.
But not this time. Not for the Kansas players. They were ready. Some of the excitement came from the emotions they’d been harboring during their break from the Arizona loss and comments from family and friends, like the Morris twins heard all about in Philadelphia.
But on the evening of December 27, when they arrived back for the first practice, junior guard Sherron Collins sent the excitement level even higher.
He came into the locker room that night with a message. Collins told the team to forget about Arizona, to get through this. He told them to have fun, to let basketball come naturally.
The next three days, the Jayhawks did that. They practiced twice a day, and Reed said the team had never felt better.
“We just had more energy,” he said, “more bounce.”
Marcus noticed it, too. More guys were talking. They’d give each other encouraging words and remind them to shrug off the bad plays. More guys were dunking. They were playing with energy.
“That’s what we lacked at the beginning of the year,” Marcus said. “We weren’t really having fun in practice. It just shows on the court now.”
Marcus was referring to the Albany game. In a way, he was channeling the words of Self.
For years, he’s talked about how teams play like they practice. And that wasn’t good, because he said this year’s team had practiced poorly for the first two months of the season.
In the three days since they were back since Christmas that had changed. Self said they’d practiced much better.
And on Tuesday, he saw that in the game. Self was impressed. He could still point out three specific occasions where his team made silly turnovers and that it should’ve easily scored 50 in the first half, but he was impressed with how it translated its newfound energy in practice into the game.
“This team is getting better in that regard,” he said.
Tennessee beckons next. The Jayhawks have been watching the nationally ranked Volunteers often. Self says they’re the fastest team they’ve played all year, and Morris said they’d face a major challenge on Saturday.
Until then, they’ll practice. And well, Kansas has had plenty of fun doing that lately.
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