NCAA Tournament 2018: 5 reasons Kansas won’t win it all
By Chris Stone
3. The Jayhawks don’t get to the foul line
Kansas is one of the elite shooting teams in the field. In fact, only two teams — Purdue and Michigan State — have converted a higher percentage of their 3-point attempts this season than the Jayhawks and only the Boilermakers and Villanova have a better season-long effective field goal percentage, per KenPom.
However, Kansas can struggle when the shots aren’t falling because its roster doesn’t do a great job of getting to the foul line on a consistent basis. The Jayhawks rank 335th nationally in free throw rate, a statistic that measures the number of free throw attempts you take relative to total field goal attempts. It’s the third lowest mark in the field of 68.
Only two players on the Kansas roster — Devonte’ Graham and Udoka Azubuike — draw fouls at a consistent rate. And in Azubuike’s case, that’s not a good thing. The big man has made just 41.6 percent of his free throws this season.
Not being able to get to the foul line can limit a team’s opportunities to score in tight contests by forcing them to rely on less reliable means of scoring production. Again, this isn’t necessarily something that means Kansas can’t win the title, but it lowers the team’s margin for error significantly.
As it can be with the struggling defense, if the Jayhawks aren’t getting to the foul line, they’ll need their shots to be falling. Notably three of their seven losses this season came when they posted one of their six worst free throw rate games of the season.