photo by: AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh

Kansas guard Darryn Peterson attends the NBA basketball draft lottery in Chicago, Sunday, May 10, 2026.

Darryn Peterson’s lone season at Kansas already feels like it was “so long ago,” the guard told reporters on Wednesday.

Indeed, he’s had a busy couple of months since the Jayhawks lost in the second round of the NCAA Tournament, and in particular a busy week at the NBA Draft Combine in Chicago, which continues through Sunday.

The event is giving NBA teams an opportunity to evaluate Peterson up close and personal after a strange season at KU in which he missed 11 games and spent the majority of the rest hampered by injuries, most notably a persistent leg cramping issue.

Despite all that he still averaged 20.2 points per game, shot 43.8% from the field and 38.2% from beyond the arc, and has a chance to go No. 1 overall to the Washington Wizards on June 23, even if most mock drafts now project him at No. 2 overall to the Utah Jazz behind BYU’s AJ Dybantsa.

Some of Peterson’s time in Chicago to this point has been devoted to the usual combine measurables.

He came in at 6-foot-4 1/2 without shoes (tied for fifth among guards) with a wingspan of 6-foot 9 3/4 (fourth) and standing reach of 8-foot-7 (tied for fourth). His standing vertical leap of 31.5 inches tied for 11th out of 30 guards and his maximum vertical leap of 37.5 tied for 14th. His three quarter sprint in 3.16 seconds placed him in seventh, but his shuttle run time of 2.95 was 20th and his lane agility time of 11.17 was 21st. He took part in shooting drills, with a 19-for-25 showing on stationary 3-pointers the standout result.

But the combine has also presented an opportunity for Peterson to reflect on and reshape the prevailing narratives of his 2025-26 season — a process that began even beforehand on May 8 when in an interview with ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne, he said that taking large amounts of creatine, a common supplement that helps muscles contract, was responsible for the cramping.

Peterson said in the interview that he had a high level of creatine already present in his body that meant that when he ingested more it “must’ve made the levels unsafe.” He recounted the now-well-known story of his full-body cramping episode from September and said it left him scared that it might happen again whenever he felt anything similar over the course of the year; he told ESPN he hasn’t had issues since he stopped taking creatine.

With those problems apparently in the rearview, Peterson was able to reflect on his season at KU at times during his session with reporters on Wednesday.

He had acknowledged in the ESPN interview that he felt “there was another level of me that people didn’t get to see” during his time at Kansas. On Wednesday he said he feels he is back at the level of athleticism he displayed in high school, when he was the national player of the year at Prolific Prep.

“Obviously I wasn’t where I wanted to be, just with what I had going on,” he said. “But I feel like I’m back at it now.”

He credited that simply to figuring out what was causing the cramping.

“That kind of helped my mental as well, because when something’s wrong (and) you don’t know what it is, it kind of can be rough,” he said. “So it helped my mental figuring out what it was, and now just getting back to it, feeling good.”

He did say that he felt he was in a good mental state throughout his time at KU as he faced a variety of criticisms, many unfounded, amid the cramping issues.

“It could have been easy for me to kind of feel sorry for myself or go into a shell and be a bad teammate,” Peterson said. “But me being me, I knew that none of it being said was true, so I didn’t find it important at all.”

On a related topic, he wanted to correct the record on the public notion that he is “quiet,” one he attributed in part to a comment he made on Feb. 23 after a win over Houston about being an “antisocial loner.” He did say he can be “locked in” during games.

“I think I used the wrong words with that,” Peterson said of the “loner” comment. “People took that and ran with it, but I meant like during that process (of dealing with criticism) I was just super introverted, I wasn’t talking about it, mainly because I didn’t know what was going on.”

From an on-court standpoint, the injury issues Peterson battled during his season in Lawrence affected his play style somewhat. He agreed with a reporter’s assessment that the injuries encouraged him to display more proficient 3-point shooting (and indeed, he did a lot of his scoring from behind the 3-point line when he was dealing with particularly frequent bouts of cramping).

“I didn’t have the same step that I had before, just with what was going on,” he said. “Kind of like if one thing’s bad, something else improves, kind of.”

He has also said that the health issues prevented him from playing as much on the ball. Peterson recently told Andscape, “I am a point guard. I’m the best when I have the ball in my hands.”

Time will tell whether the team that drafts him deploys him in that particular role. He told reporters he had already met with 10 teams. Various reports suggest the Wizards, Chicago Bulls and Memphis Grizzlies were among them.