Kansas center Hunter Dickinson (1) prepares to pull up for a three during a day of practices and press conferences at Delta Center on Wednesday, March 20, 2024 in Salt Lake City. Photo by Nick Krug

Salt Lake City — The day the Kansas men’s basketball team got its NCAA Tournament assignment, head coach Bill Self answered a question about his team’s overall confidence shooting the ball in practice by honing in on one specific player.

“I think that when we get Hunter (Dickinson) back, I think he automatically gives you confidence,” Self said Sunday. “He’s different that way, and he’ll give us more this time of year than ever.”

Dickinson’s personal impact as a player isn’t focused on shooting; in fact, he hasn’t shot particularly well in a while. But that’s not the value he provides. To hear his teammates tell it, the newly minted second-team All-American center — even beyond his own impressive stats, double-double average and so on — really does have a kind of uplifting effect on the rest of the Jayhawks’ performance, and not only on offense.

“He’s very versatile in a ton of different ways and he attracts so much attention on both ends, it just kind of frees you up, lets you play your game,” said Parker Braun, his backup. “It kind of takes a lot of pressure off you to do your job.”

Freshman guard Elmarko Jackson told the Journal-World that Dickinson’s passing and skill set were “Jokić-esque,” in a reference to the Denver Nuggets’ all-world center Nikola Jokić.

“It just makes the game easier for everybody having a person that draws that much gravity to them,” Jackson said. “It just makes scoring easier for everybody else.”

This year’s KU team got its first, and it hopes only, taste of life without Dickinson when he missed the Big 12 Conference tournament loss to Cincinnati due to a dislocated shoulder. But on the same day Dickinson’s teammates praised him in the Delta Center locker room, Self reiterated that the 7-foot-2 big man is back playing with “no limitations.”

“The shoulder feels good,” Dickinson said Wednesday. “Good enough to be out there with my teammates.”

They’ll need him out there all the more desperately in the absence of Kevin McCullar Jr., whom KJ Adams, something of a spark plug himself, described as the other half of a pair of “energy players” along with Dickinson.

“Hunter, when he’s on the court, now hopefully when he plays tomorrow, we’re going to have a lot more energy,” Adams said.

Dickinson will be facing a group of big men who want to leverage their own energy to take down the Jayhawks.

“We’re just going to have to be super physical and play our game,” Samford’s Riley Allenspach, the 10th of 10 Bulldogs averaging at least 12 minutes a game, told the Journal-World. “We’re going to try to get up and down and play fast like we normally do, and kind of use that to our advantage, and then on defense just play as physical as possible and try not to be in foul trouble.”

Samford’s 6-foot-9 starting post player Achor Achor downplayed his height disadvantage Wednesday, saying, “At the end of the day, you have to step between the lines. That’s how I look at that.” It’s not just Achor tasked with handling Dickinson, though, as the Bulldogs do have taller backups, like the 6-foot-11 Allenspach, off the bench.

“It will definitely be a tough task for me and Parker to kind of have that kind of rotating belt of big men that we got to face,” Dickinson said.

He may attract even more attention than usual in McCullar’s absence. It’s a small sample size, but in five games he’s played without his fellow veteran leader, he’s tallied on average 14.6 points and 8.6 rebounds, compared to the 18.6 and 11.3 he’s averaged in the remaining 26.

“We need him. He knows we need him,” point guard Dajuan Harris Jr. said. “We’re going to ride him along this whole March run. But he’s one of the best centers in the country. We just got to follow (behind) him and make him make plays for us. I got to make plays for me and him, too.”