Kansas guard Dajuan Harris Jr. (3) pulls up for a three off of a pick from Kansas center Hunter Dickinson (1) during the first half against North Carolina State on Saturday, Dec. 14, 2024 at Allen Fieldhouse. Photo by Nick Krug

On a night when he went on to shoot 5-for-9 from beyond the arc, Kansas guard Zeke Mayo had a decent opportunity in the opening minutes to lob a deep 3-pointer over N.C. State guard Michael O’Connell from the right wing.

Instead, he bounced it in to center Hunter Dickinson in the post, sending O’Connell flying out of the play towards the Wolfpack’s bench. Dickinson immediately returned the favor in one fluid motion by slinging it to Mayo, who had in a split second relocated closer to the center of the arc, and the guard from Lawrence proceeded to drain a higher-quality shot to put KU up 10-0.

“Hunter’s a high-percentage shooter from 10 feet and closer,” Mayo said. “I’m going to pass up a good look for a great look, and I feel like any time he has the ball down low it’s a great look for us.”

Dickinson added: “We had been actually kind of working on plays similar to that, but when you got a guy like Zeke who’s so high-IQ, and he’s just a basketball player, he makes the right reads — he threw it in, his man turned his head, he relocated, that’s just a basketball play.”

The play, though, was as much a testament to Dickinson’s feel for the game as it was to Mayo’s. The center matched a nearly three-year-old career high with seven assists in Saturday afternoon’s 75-60 victory, demonstrating a signiifcant way in which simply allowing him to touch the ball allows him to impact the game beyond scoring. (Of course, as he often does, he scored 21 points, too.)

For Dickinson, it was a product of N.C. State’s defensive play style — encapsulated in part by O’Connell’s aggressive closeout on Mayo.

“We knew how they were going to guard, we knew they were going to be really overly aggressive and that was going to lead to backdoors and stuff like that,” he said. “And we had been really working with KJ (Adams) on getting him down in the post and utilizing his size and just his athleticism, so I kind of knew that I was going to be able to facilitate out there. Guys made some really good cuts, and they found themselves open, so I had to hit them.”

The performance formed a stark contrast with how Dickinson had been forcibly removed — or vanished — from KU’s resounding loss at Creighton just 10 days prior. It wasn’t just that Dickinson took very few shots in that game, but that he hardly got his hands on the ball at all.

After that matchup, he said he took time to consider the way the Bluejays had guarded him and how he could adapt moving forward.

“I think when teams try to take me out of the game, I kind of almost let them,” he reflected, “and (don’t) become even more aggressive, trying to find not only just shots, but putting myself in position to where I can impact the game offensively.”

He managed to do so in numerous ways on Saturday, particularly by facilitating the Jayhawks’ long-dormant outside shooting. After he set up Mayo’s early shot, his next five assists were on successful 3-pointers by Dajuan Harris Jr. (twice), David Coit and Mayo (two more times). That means that 60% of KU’s 10 3s on the night came off assists from their center. Only one of Dickinson’s seven assists went for two points, a layup by Harris with two minutes to go.

Dickinson actually thought he should have been credited with more assists, he said postgame. He didn’t quite make it to his first triple-double since junior high at the Mater Dei School.

Quibbles aside, the center’s passing performance — which he accomplished in an uncommonly low 28 minutes, by the way, due to early foul trouble — helped to demonstrate a proof of concept for the Jayhawks, who loaded up on shooters in the offseason likely expecting that Dickinson’s gravitational pull in the paint would open up opportunities for them. On Saturday, it did just that.

“We got to do a better job of playing through him, and he’s got to do a better job of cleaning some things up,” head coach Bill Self said, “but I thought he and Juan and Zeke were really good tonight. I mean really good.”