Kansas center Hunter Dickinson (1) huddles up his teammates after a timeout during the first half on Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2024 at Allen Fieldhouse. Photo by Nick Krug

Salt Lake City — Throughout the latter part of Kansas’ schedule — as the Jayhawks have been debilitated by injuries to their two best players, and slipped in the Big 12 Conference as a result — coach Bill Self has been repeatedly stressing that they can play with anyone when they become “whole” again.

As it turns out, they will not be whole for the remainder of the season.

When Self revealed Tuesday night outside the team hotel in Salt Lake City that graduate senior guard Kevin McCullar Jr. will miss the NCAA Tournament — he hasn’t gotten past his nagging bone bruise — it robbed KU of its top scorer, lockdown defender and overall “pressure release,” as center Hunter Dickinson once called McCullar.

Instead, the Jayhawks will be trotting out a rendition of their team — with Dickinson, without McCullar — that won comfortably against Oklahoma State and Texas and slipped by Baylor at Allen Fieldhouse, but also got crushed by Texas Tech on the road and suffered a rare home loss to BYU.

Dickinson, for his part, has been practicing in full and is expected to return to play after dislocating his shoulder on March 9, and either freshman Elmarko Jackson or Nick Timberlake will get a start in McCullar’s place; neither one was particularly distinguished when restored to the starting lineup last week in KU’s Big 12 tournament cameo. As Self put it Tuesday, “it’s put up or shut up time” for those two. Both are shooting less than 40% on the year.

However the Jayhawks may perform, there will only be eight of them on scholarship. As it happens, their first-round opponent, No. 13 seed Samford, is a team that plays 10 guys at least 12 minutes per game, gets out on the break (its 15.26 fast-break points per game are seventh in the nation) and, as Self noted, pressures relentlessly.

“I don’t remember ever playing against anybody that presses after misses, that presses on missed free throws, that (presses) on missed field goals,” Self said. “They’re going to get after us. They mix it up. Sometimes it could just be man, sometimes it could be run-and-jump, sometimes a 2-2-1, a lot of different things.”

If the Jayhawks can’t handle it well, it could be an exhausting night for KU in the thin air of Salt Lake City, back playing where it beat Northeastern but lost to Auburn in the 2019 NCAA Tournament.

“It’s really a track meet,” Achor said. “Not a lot of people in the country conditioned like us, to be honest. I don’t think a lot of people are equipped to run with us the whole game.”

Of those 10 main contributors for the Bulldogs, seven make at least 36% of their 3-pointers, and that includes highest-volume shooters Rylan Jones (55-for-144, 38.2%) and Jaden Campbell (51-for-108, 47.2%), but even the 6-foot-9 post player Achor Achor makes them 45% of the time, albeit in a small sample size. It is the sort of play style — stretching the floor from all five spots — that, as Self has noted, KU struggled against all through conference play.

“They’re constantly trying to make sure they get up and down and have as many possessions as possible,” Dickinson said. “I think that’s the reason why they’re able to play so many guys and have that team chemistry where guys aren’t worried about their minutes. They really have a lot of possessions. Leads to a lot of shots, scoring opportunities for guys. I think that’s a big reason why they’re so successful with their style of play.”

Certainly Achor’s versatility will put a defensive burden on Dickinson, beyond the offensive responsibility he’ll already be shouldering with McCullar out. The junior from Melbourne, Australia, is Samford’s top scorer with 15.8 points per game and adds 6.1 rebounds.

The offensive firepower goes far beyond just one standout, though, as Samford cleared the 100-point mark five times this season.

Without their own top scorer, the Jayhawks will need to keep the Bulldogs significantly lower than that to advance past the first round for a 17th straight time.

Samford certainly doesn’t lack confidence. Forward Jermaine Marshall said he was disappointed McCullar wasn’t playing — “I want to play the opponent at their best because I know we are at our best and I know what we can do at our best” — and added, “I feel we’re going to win and when we win, it’s not going to be a surprise to us.”

No. 13 Samford Bulldogs (29-5, 15-3 Southern Conference) vs. No. 4 Kansas Jayhawks (22-10, 10-8 Big 12)

• Delta Center, Salt Lake City, 8:55 p.m. Central Time

• Broadcast: TBS

• Radio: Jayhawk Radio Network (in Lawrence, KLWN AM 1320 / K269GB FM 101.7 / KKSW FM 105.9)

Keep an eye out

Level of play: The necessary caveat to all of Samford’s flashy offensive stats is that the Bulldogs did it against significantly lesser competition. Their strength of schedule was 247th in the nation, according to KenPom, and the one time they faced a power-conference foe, they lost by 53 and shot 25% from the floor. Granted, it was now-No. 1 seed Purdue. The Bulldogs have lost just three games since Nov. 10 — at Furman (KenPom rank 147), at Mercer (193), at Wofford (217) — and will certainly enter with confidence, but they haven’t played a team the caliber of Kansas, even a depleted Kansas, in months.

Size advantage: On a similar note, if Dickinson really can go Thursday, he will provide a paint presence inside the likes of which Samford hasn’t seen. Even discounting his scoring prowess, he’s the only Big 12 player averaging double-digit rebounds. KU and Samford are pretty close in terms of team rebounding — the Jayhawks grab 35.97 boards per game to the Bulldogs’ 35.79 — but at least when Samford plays its primary lineup, Dickinson will have a 5-inch height advantage on any Bulldog, and adept rebounder Johnny Furphy is the same height as his fellow Melbourne native Achor. Samford does have some height off the bench in the form of 6-foot-11 freshman Riley Allenspach and 7-foot Baylor transfer Zach Loveday, and it may need to call those players into action. Dickinson hasn’t always benefited as much as expected from his height advantage this season, but then again he had 27 points and 21 rebounds against Kentucky when the Wildcats were missing their tallest players, 20 points and eight rebounds in the first game against Houston, and so on.

New mentality: KJ Adams, who had to assume the role of a center and primary scoring option for KU against Cincinnati when both Dickinson and McCullar were out, ended up scoring nearly half of his team’s points and matched a career-best effort with 22. He said postgame that he was playing the same way he always does, “just a little bit more aggressive.” It might behoove him to transfer that aggressiveness to the tournament, even with Dickinson back, as in previous games without McCullar the Jayhawks have often struggled to create shots without high-level ball movement, particularly at the end of the shot clock. (The BYU loss was a particularly egregious example.) If Adams can generate his own at times it’ll ease that burden considerably.

Off-kilter observation

KU walk-on Wilder Evers is a native of Birmingham, Alabama; Samford is located in Homewood, a Birmingham suburb not far from the city center.

A look ahead

The winner of Thursday night’s game will face the winner of No. 5 Gonzaga’s battle with No. 12 McNeese in the second round of the NCAA Tournament two days later.