Kansas Adopting Defense as the Best Way to Play to Its Potential

Watching Kansas corral, spook and intimidate Michigan State over the final 20 minutes of Sunday's Orlando Classic was strangely surreal.

It was a role reversal from 12 days prior, when Kentucky—much more emphatically—did the same to Kansas and had the general basketball population questioning if Bill Self was finally going to have a down year in Lawrence.

Three wins at the Orlando Classic—finished off by the gritty 61-56 victory over Michigan State in the championship game—proved any such questioning of the 11th-ranked Jayhawks to be wildly premature.

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Kansas took its whooping and learned from it. 

The product that Self has put on the floor since the Kentucky loss has looked much more like his typical teams. The Jayhawks move the ball, they play hard and they defend. 

In a way, they play like Kentucky. 

That's not to say Kansas is even on the same stratosphere as UK right now—only Wisconsin, Duke and Gonzaga seem to be within earshot—but Self's team has potential to get much closer than it looked at the Champions Classic. 

The key on Sunday against the Spartans was a defense that operated the way dominant defenses of Self's past have operated.

The narrative of this Kansas team, one that Self himself has created, has been that it needs to be sound on the defensive end and learn how to play without a rim protector like Cole Aldrich, Jeff Withey or Joel Embiid. Those big fellas allowed the Jayhawks to pressure the ball and funnel drivers into a shot-blocking web. 

The Jayhawks showed shades of that kind of defense on Sunday, and their ceiling on the defensive end is raised if freshman Cliff Alexander provides the type of shot blocking that he provided against the Spartans.

Alexander had four blocks and helped hold Michigan to 31 percent shooting inside the arc. Sparty missed 11 of their 19 attempts at the basket. 

Michigan State coach Tom Izzo believed those misses were self-imposed. 

But, much like the mind tricks UK's length has on opponents, Alexander's and KU's challenges in the interior had something to do with such poor shooting. 

The shot-blocking presence of Alexander allowed the Jayhawks to apply pressure on the perimeter, force guarded shots and run the Spartans off the three-point line—they made five threes in the first half and only one after halftime. They had one more attempt from deep after halftime but had much better looks in the first half. 

This is how all of Self's great defenses operate and why Alexander is such an integral part to this team's success. He is the one intimidating presence in the paint Self has in his arsenal, and even though Alexander scored only six points, he had his biggest impact yet. It's only a matter of time before Self trusts the big man enough to make him a starter. 

Alexander wasn't the only one in Orlando who started to understand his role either. 

Perry Ellis has emerged, as expected, as KU's go-to scorer, and he averaged 19.3 points per game in Orlando. Ellis is aggressively getting to his scoring spots on the floor off pick-and-pops or strong post-ups. His confidence is back after scoring only four points on 1-of-6 shooting against Kentucky.

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Freshman wing Sviatoslav Mykhailiuk has shaken off early-season nerves and has started to make shots—3-of-6 from deep against Michigan State—and is even making plays off the dribble. Point guard Frank Mason is playing more like a point guard and getting better at picking his spots to attack the rim instead of driving with reckless abandon like he did against UK.

Even Wayne Selden, who went 0-of-10 against MSU and is struggling with his shot, is providing leadership with effort plays and extra passes.

The Jayhawks are far from a finished product and still had some sloppy segments in Orlando, but it's not surprising that it has taken a few weeks for a team with four freshmen in the rotation to start to find its way.

Give Kansas credit for not sulking after the UK loss and even adopting some of the Kentucky blueprint. 

This is still a team that could play to its preseason ranking, especially if the Jayhawks play with the kind of effort on the defensive end they used to finish off the Spartans. 

C.J. Moore covers college basketball for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter @CJMooreBR.