Kansas guard Darryn Peterson (22) watches warmups from the sideline before tipoff against Texas A&M-Corpus Christi on Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025 at Allen Fieldhouse. Photo by Nick Krug

The Kansas men’s basketball team returns to the floor on Saturday at 1 p.m. to continue its nonconference slate at home against Princeton, but one player will quite conspicuously not be taking the court.

KU coach Bill Self announced on Friday that star freshman Darryn Peterson will miss his second straight game due to hamstring tightness.

“He is still sore, and for whatever reason, it’s still sore, and (we’re) trying to figure it out,” Self said. “We don’t think it’s a long-term deal at all, but as long as it’s still this sore, he says, and limits him at all, there’s no reason to put him out there yet. So that’s where we’re at.”

Self said the hamstring issue in question first came up “weeks ago,” but Peterson has played through it. The guard from Canton, Ohio, looked every bit as talented as advertised over the course of KU’s exhibition season and its first two regular-season contests against Green Bay and North Carolina. But he was limited (and missed one exhibition) prior to that UNC game due to what Self described at the time as recurring issues with cramps and an illness.

Then, against UNC, Self said Peterson told him his hamstring “felt different” after an early stretch of the game in which he stole the ball and scored a layup.

On Tuesday, he sat out KU’s game against Texas A&M-Corpus Christi. The Jayhawks rolled over the Islanders 77-46, led by a breakout showing from fellow freshman Kohl Rosario (16 points, five rebounds), but the health of Peterson has become a prominent storyline in the early days of KU’s season — and it will continue to be as the Tigers come to town.

Peterson hadn’t practiced the last two days when Self spoke to the media on Friday. Self said he wasn’t yet concerned about the potential effect his absence from practice could have on the team’s development.

“Right now, a couple of days, I’m not,” Self said. “Guys, he practiced the day of our game on Tuesday. But he said it just feels tight, and it still felt tight yesterday.”

So it’ll be Rosario, Flory Bidunga and the rest tackling KU’s next challenge.

“I think it’s great for us,” Bidunga said on Friday. “Obviously I feel like he’s a great player, but I feel like who knows, in the future, maybe he will get foul trouble and then we need to learn to play without him, so I think it’s a great opportunity for us to just play without him and just grow as well.”

Princeton went through a run of success that included three straight Ivy League regular-season championships — a period in which they also went on a memorable run to the 2023 Sweet 16 as a No. 15 seed — but last year the Tigers came in fourth place and exited in the semifinals of Ivy Madness, and this season they were picked to finish fourth again.

Ivy League basketball enjoys more continuity than most leagues, but that hasn’t necessarily been the case at Princeton of late. Guard Xaivian Lee, a unanimous first-team all-conference pick who stuffed the stat sheet with 16.9 points, 6.1 rebounds and 5.5 assists, transferred to Florida (after he was briefly linked to KU in the portal). Forward Caden Pierce, who had been the league’s player of the year the previous season, decided this past summer to redshirt, earn his degree and then transfer elsewhere next spring. Veteran head coach Mitch Henderson also made multiple changes to his staff.

The Tigers’ main returning contributor from last season is Dalen Davis, a 6-foot junior guard from Chicago who has become their primary scoring option. He racked up 25 points on 8-for-16 shooting in Princeton’s 73-63 win over Bucknell. No one was that effective in the Tigers’ other game against Division I opposition, a 104-69 blowout loss at Akron in which they fell behind by 20 points after shooting 28.1% in the first half. Jackson Hicke, a 6-foot-5 guard, paced Princeton in scoring in that game. Other returning players of note include 6-foot-2 guard Jack Stanton and 6-foot-9 forward CJ Happy, who entered the starting lineup late in his rookie season and provides the Tigers some much-needed size.

They also have already once started a newcomer in 6-foot-8 freshman Landon Clark, a Bangor, Maine, native who primarily shoots 3s. The Tigers improved to 2-1 on Thursday by beating John Jay College, a Division III school, 100-59.

“They’re shooting over 30 3s a game,” Self said. “They back-cut the heck out of you and we’ve struggled guarding back cuts. If you can eliminate 3s and back cuts, that would probably be a pretty good formula to have at least a little bit of defensive success because they can make you look pretty foolish with those two things.”

No. 25 Kansas Jayhawks (2-1) vs. Princeton Tigers (2-1)

• Allen Fieldhouse, Lawrence, 1 p.m.

• Broadcast: ESPN+

• Radio: Jayhawk Radio Network (in Lawrence, KLWN AM 1320 / K269GB FM 101.7 / KKSW FM 105.9 / KMXN FM 92.9)

Keep an eye out

Fresh face: A newly clean-shaven Rosario impressed on Tuesday and knocked down a couple of 3s after doing most of his scoring above the rim. The self-assured freshman from Miami said postgame that his confidence hadn’t faded at all amid a slow start to his tenure in Lawrence — which was clear as he continued to play with aggression and assertiveness on Tuesday. Now the task becomes for Rosario to stretch his production to multiple games in a row and develop consistency.

Three starters: Self made the somewhat surprising remark after the TAMUCC game that he felt KU had three starting-caliber players in its frontcourt in Bidunga, Tre White and upstart freshman Bryson Tiller. Tiller has excelled while playing his first competitive basketball in a year and a half, and shown some skills like outside shooting that have surprised even Self. The question is, if Self truly has this much faith in his redshirt freshman, will he see increased minutes, and at whose expense will they come?

Luck or skill?: Bidunga was consigned to the bench with foul trouble for much of the first half of the TAMUCC game, which was an all-too-familiar sight for KU fans after he dealt with that sort of thing often throughout his freshman year. But while Self has acknowledged that Bidunga can be more disciplined, he didn’t think it was really his fault on Tuesday; Self called the first of Bidunga’s three early fouls a phantom call and attributed the third to a defensive error by guard Jayden Dawson. If Bidunga is indeed improving in this realm, Saturday’s game presents another opportunity for him to demonstrate that development — which will be essential without Peterson to serve as KU’s primary scoring option.

Off-kilter observation

This is far earlier in the calendar than the Jayhawks have played Ivy League programs of late. In 2022, 2023 and 2024, KU faced Harvard, Yale and Brown, respectively, at Allen Fieldhouse, and each game was on Dec. 22 and served as the final matchup before the Jayhawks’ holiday break. (This year’s pre-holiday game on Dec. 22 is instead against Davidson.)

Saturday’s game will be the earliest in the fall that KU has ever faced an Ivy; the previous record was Nov. 17, 1998 against Penn. (That game technically occurred at an earlier stage of the Jayhawks’ season, which they had opened just four days beforehand.)