Kansas City, Mo. ? Ask Bob Knight how he feels about playing in his first Big 12 tournament in Kansas City, and you get two distinctly different answers.

“Kansas City’s a nice town, nice people,” the Texas Tech coach said Wednesday.

If he’s less than enthused about playing the conference tournament here, it’s because he’s less than enthused about playing one anywhere.

“I’ve never been real big on postseason conference tournaments,” said Knight, whose fifth-seeded Red Raiders play 12th seed Texas A&M today. “I’ve always felt that postseason conference tournaments take away from the conference championship.

“Kansas goes unbeaten this year in a pretty strong league,” Knight said of the top-ranked Jayhawks.

“That’s 16 wins in a row against good teams. If they lose in the tournament, does that take away from what they did in the regular season?”

A loss shouldn’t diminish a conference champion so much as reflect credit on the victor, said Kelvin Sampson, the coach of fourth-ranked Oklahoma.

“This is a chance for a team to catch lightning in a bottle,” said Sampson, whose team is seeded second this year after winning the tournament title last year.

And if that means a loss for a team on the tournament bubble or one, like Oklahoma, that’s angling for a No. 1 seed in an NCAA regional that’s the price of inclusion, Sampson said.

“You can’t just do what’s best for a few teams,” he said. “You have to do what’s best for the whole conference.”

Last Looks: Whether he elects to stay at Missouri or leave a year early for the NBA, forward Kareem Rush will be playing his last Big 12 tournament in his hometown.

The tournament, a fixture in Kansas City since the late 1970s in the days of the Big Eight is headed to Dallas next year.

“This is my last chance to play in front of the hometown fans, even if I don’t come back and I’m not saying I’m not,” Rush said. “Hopefully we can all go out and play well and have some fun.”

Coaching Experience: Of the 14 members of the 700-win club, two are coaching at Kemper this week: Knight (785-296) and Oklahoma State’s Eddie Sutton (702-276). Baylor’s Dave Bliss has 512 career wins. Kansas’ Roy Williams has 382.

Switching Off “The Brink”: When Sunday rolls around, Knight and his team will be watching the NCAA tournament selections, but they won’t stick around afterward to watch Brian Dennehy star as Knight in ESPN’s production of “A Season on the Brink.”

In his upcoming book, “Knight: My Story,” Knight writes that he put down the 1986 bestseller by John Feinstein, which chronicles Knight’s 1985-86 season at Indiana, after only a few pages.

No Hawk Talk: The best question at Kansas State’s news conference, as far as coach Jim Wooldridge was concerned, was the one that didn’t get asked.

“No Kansas questions? Good,” Wooldridge said as he left the interview room.