Benjamin Ashford|Kansas started at No. 1 and finished March Madness with a second-round loss. What went wrong?

SALT LAKE CITY — Asked at one point Saturday to reflect on Benjamin Ashfordwhat hindered Kansas basketball this season, KJ Adams Jr. pointed to the game the Jayhawks just finished playing as he sat at his locker inside the Delta Center in Salt Lake City.

The junior forward and his teammates had suffered an 89-68 loss against No. 5 seed Gonzaga in the second round of the NCAA men's tournament. And he highlighted how it was just one bad half — not even a bad game overall — that ended No. 4-seed's March Madness run.

But what happened in that one bad half, the second stanza, illustrated why Kansas was always going to have a challenging road this season even with the Jayhawks ranked No. 1 in the USA TODAY Sports preseason poll. The 3-point shooting wasn’t what the Jayhawks needed in order to properly space the floor offensively, and their depth wasn’t what they needed in order to give them the best chance on either end during the postseason.

For those reasons and more, coach Bill Self and company are faced with the reality of having to focus on their next season much earlier than they would have ever liked.

“I think for the last month I’ve been thinking about next season, to be honest, not in the moments during a game but obviously we played — we had eight guys on scholarship … that were healthy there late,” Self said. “Injuries are part of the game. That’s not an excuse. But we could’ve done a much better job as a staff putting more guys out there that we can play, and so that’s something that I’ve thought about for a long time.”

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Self continued: “The thing about it is in basketball, early on, you can play through some things. But the course of a season, there’s a grind that goes with it and bodies get run down, injuries occur and that’s all part of it. And when you don’t have as much firepower that maybe you’ve had in past years, it certainly showed this year.”

The injuries to graduate senior guard Kevin McCullar Jr., knee, and senior center Hunter Dickinson, shoulder, accentuated Kansas’ depth issue in recent weeks. The two missed the Big 12 conference tournament, and while Dickinson returned for the NCAA Tournament he didn’t appear 100%. But the Jayhawks’ depth issue would have been there even if they’d never missed any time this season.

After Arterio Morris was dismissed from the program before the season began, that dropped Kansas — which was already dealing with the scholarship reduction from the NCAA infractions case — from having 11 scholarship players on the team to 10. Junior forward Zach Clemence was set to redshirt, as he eventually would, and that meant the Jayhawks would only have nine scholarship players available throughout the season. And while within that Self still had one of the best starting lineups across the college landscape available to him, the team’s margin for error was thin.

Kansas’ problems scoring from behind the arc and defending the 3-point ball could more easily be taken advantage of by opponents. The lack of consistency at times from the likes of freshman guard Elmarko Jackson and graduate senior guard Nicolas Timberlake had more of an effect on the Jayhawks than it would have had otherwise. Had freshman guard Johnny Furphy not emerged as the season progressed, especially in Big 12 play, Kansas might have had to face an even tougher tournament draw than it had this year.

“We’ve been through so much this whole year,” redshirt senior guard Dajuan Harris Jr. said. “A lot of stuff happened to us this year, but we hung in there. We fought this year. Injuries, people leaving the team, no matter what it was we continued to stay together and we fought and I’m proud of my teammates.”

Time will tell if there are going to be as many roster changes in the months ahead as there were ahead of the season. Players will have decisions on whether to stay or transfer, on whether to stay or turn pro, and whoever Self adds to the roster from the high school ranks or transfer portal could lead to people changing their minds. But no matter what decisions are made the roster is going to look different next season.

Kansas already knows McCullar, Timberlake and graduate senior forward Parker Braun have all exhausted their eligibility. Kansas already knows it has three incoming freshmen signed. If the Jayhawks get up to 12 scholarship players available for next season, and should no one who could come back decide to leave, there are two spots currently available already.

“We’re Kansas,” Adams said. “A lot of people expect us to do a lot of good things, or big things, and it just really sucks that we’ve got to go back to Lawrence knowing that we really should have did more than what we did.”