Bill Self called out one of his Kansas players about as strongly as one possibly can.
On Wednesday night, Kansas’s Brannen Greene threw down a dunk as time was expiring in the second half against rival Kansas State. That made the score of the game 77-59, and the Jayhawks could have very easily dribbled out the clock. In fact, everyone except for Greene was already headed off the court. Here’s video:
Final moments of the KU-K-State game. pic.twitter.com/Y1rhdOycJI
— Jesse Newell (@jessenewell) February 4, 2016
Self didn’t like it. In fact, it would be fair to say he downright hated it.
“Brannen Greene, we’ve put up with him doing some stuff in the past, but that was probably the biggest d— move I’ve ever had a player do during a game,” Self said on the postgame radio show, via the Topeka Capital-Journal’s Matt Galloway. “To dunk the ball like that when the other team – even their players are going, ‘How disrespectful to the game.’ It certainly showed unbelievably poor sportsmanship.
“I’m so pissed right now that we represented the way we did at the end.”
Not often you’ll hear a coach so thoroughly eviscerate one of his own players in public. It seems a bit over the top – an apology and a frank discussion behind closed doors seems like it would have sufficed – but Self has clashed with Greene before, so that may have played into the reaction.
Interestingly, this is not the first time Self has had to deal with this sort of thing. Elijah Johnson did something similar in a 2013 game against Iowa State, but he didn’t get this sort of treatment from Self – perhaps because he didn’t have Greene’s previous history, or perhaps because he apologized himself during a postgame interview.
