According to news reports, freshman Bryce Thompson is poised to return to action soon, perhaps as early as tomorrow’s home game against Iowa State. The former 5-star recruit has been injured for the better part of the conference season, and played in only 10 of the team’s 20 games thus far. The reaction to this on Jayhawk social media was a bit more optimistic than I thought it should be. Sure it is good that he is healthy, but people seemed to think that Thompson was a) either playing well before he got hurt or b) could be a productive player to help the team moving forward. While it remains to be seen how he plays moving forward, his first 10 games as a college basketball player were not entirely outstanding or even helpful to the team.
First, the traditional stats. Basketball Reference (includes Washburn game) has him averaging 5.1 ppg, 1.3 rpg, and 1.0 apg in 17.0 mpg of action. His shooting percentages, 2-pt FG%, 3-pt FG%, and FT% are as follows: 41.9%, 25.0%, 71.4%. His season high is 12 points against Gonzaga, his season low is 0 points against Kentucky.
Getting more advanced, his offensive stats show a dreadful 0.76 adjusted points per possession accounted for. All said, he is -1.48 points per game worse on offense than a hypothetical replacement player at KU’s level. Taking into account his defense, which is 1.28 adjusted points per possession allowed, he scores -0.57 points per game when compared to a replacement-level player. This leads to a total Adj PPG +/- of -2.05. That is, to put it nicely, pretty bad and would be the 3rd-worst score of any Kansas rotation player in the past 20 years.
If we rate the score in per-minute instead of per-game, Thompson would be the 4th-worst rotation player over the past 10 seasons. Incidentally, Dejuan Harris is worse than Bryce on both lists. Harris is currently 2nd-worst all time on PPG, and 3rd-worst on PPM. Harris comps best to an underclass Jeff Hawkins, and Thompson to Quentin Grimes from 2019.
In summary, Thompson has currently been dreadful so far. But he isn’t without hope. 10 games isn’t a huge amount of games, and it could just be that he is still waiting to have a breakout game that propels his score upward. After all, until he broke out of it against Oklahoma State on Monday night, Christian Braun had an Adj PPG +/- of -2.07 over his past 10 games. So it is true that good players can go on prolonged slumps. The difference is, of course, that CB played quite well during his first 9 games and also in the team’s 20th game of the season, so he is +0.17 for the season. If Thompson can get his number back trending toward -1.00, he would be a positive factor off the bench for the Jayhawks leading toward the back-stretch of the season. I hope he does. But he hasn’t shown it yet.
Charting the Hawks 