A week or so ago, while still smiling and celebrating the fact that he landed him, Kansas basketball coach Bill Self offered up a nickname for Purdue transfer Trey Kaufman-Renn.
The Connector.
The reason was simple.
“He makes the game easier for everybody on the court,” Self said then. “From his IQ to his athletic ability to his experience, his voice, there’s a lot of things he does that makes the game easier for everybody else.”
And in his brief stint with the Jayhawks so far — three starts to open the season — those things have shown up loud and clear on both ends of the floor in three Kansas victories.
His numbers won’t wow you — 12.7 points, 5.0 rebounds and 3.3 assists in 22 minutes per game so far. But the details of how he got them might.
R1S1 Sports spent most of the home win over Middle Tennessee and Tuesday’s Champions Classic victory over No. 24 Kentucky watching everything TKR did.
Here’s a breakdown of what it was, how it looked and why it worked so well for him and his new team. We’ll frame it in the five most noticeable and most consistent things he does when he’s on the floor.
Elite passing
On the very first possession against MTSU, Kaufman-Renn caught the ball at the top of the key and reversed it without hesitation. It helped the offense flow, it helped encourage ball and body movement from all four of his teammates on the floor and it came without him even having to think about it. It’s simply the way he plays the game and appears to be very ingrained in everything he does. He rolls to pass as often as he rolls to score and he appears to love finding open shooters in the opposite corner or in the short corner on his side of the floor. The pick-and-roll, big-to-big passing with him and freshman Tyran Stokes is flat-out nasty and could develop into borderline unstoppable.
He can score one-on-one against a lot of players who guard him. And, as he showed against Kentucky and in the season opener vs. Fordham, he also can extend his range out to the 3-point line. But he’s not in any way selfish about going and getting his. If the opportunity is there and it’s the best basketball play, he’ll take it. But if it’s not, he doesn’t sit around waiting for it to open up. Move the ball, move on and get someone else a look.
His ability as a passer looks natural, in part because he’s always thinking a step or two ahead of the play. That’s what makes him such a good deliverer of the ball on those back-door cuts by his teammates and it’s also what makes him seem like such a good fit with Stokes, who also is an elite passer in large part because of the way he sees and thinks the game.
He had two perfectly placed passes to teammates on back cuts during the Kentucky win. And, in the win over Middle Tennessee, he feathered a perfect slip pass through the paint to Melvin Council Jr. on a back cut that put KU up 49-18 and even made Self react with a wincing expression on his face on the bench as if to say, “That was filthy good.”
There’s nothing better on a basketball roster than having a guy who could be an automatic double-double every night still think about getting others involved first. That’s Trey Kaufman-Renn. And there’s a reason for it.
“I’ve just always tried to play that way,” he said recently. “It’s a 5-on-5 game. It’s not 1-on-1, it’s 5-on-5 and it takes everyone to win, especially at the highest level.”
Effort & hustle
Let’s go back to the opening minute of KU’s home win over Middle Tennessee. There was a play there when one of his teammates made a bad pass, but TKR, through all-out hustle and desire, was able to save the possession for the Jayhawks by getting a hand on the loose ball and knocking it out of bounds off of a Middle Tennessee player.
That was partly his intelligence at play, but most of that was just reacting to what the moment called for. He’s really good at that, on offense and defense. And, as Self said above, it helps make everyone on the floor look better as a result.
TKR hunts physicality but in a crafty way. Yes, he’s big. And, yeah, he’s a bruiser. But he’s not always the biggest dude on the floor. So using positioning, angles, hustle and heart help put him in spots to grab rebounds, track down loose balls, seal driving lanes for teammates and more. He doesn’t just go bang into bodies, but he’s always around the ball and strong enough to wrestle it away from just about anybody.
He can force/draw fouls when he posts defenders up — how good has that little hook shot looked so far? — but is just as likely to force them by battling for offensive boards, which, as you all know, is one of the best indicators of a player giving great effort. And a Bill Self favorite.
IQ & understanding
Self talked about this very early in TKR’s time on the court with KU, and we see evidence of it pretty much every game in multiple ways.
After the opener, the KU coach said Kaufman-Renn was making calls on the court before Self even had a chance to call them. That’s a player who had been here about 2 weeks already plugged into what the Jayhawks are doing, running and trying to accomplish on the floor. In a real game.
“You don’t see that very often from 4 and 5 men,” Self said. “Especially ones that have been here for two weeks. He’s really smart.”
If you watch him closely on offense, especially when he’s on the perimeter, you can see him running the plays in his head before even getting rid of the ball. It’s like he’s a step or two ahead of everyone else out there and he’s just waiting for the rest of them to catch up. The good news here is he doesn’t often turn it over or get out of sorts while doing this. He has committed just two turnovers in 65 minutes through KU’s first 3 games.
Pretty much everything on this list illustrates how smart Kaufman-Renn is. You don’t play two passes ahead, you don’t hustle for loose balls, you don’t pass to the right spots and you don’t defend and help your teammates and you certainly don’t do alllll of that without having an elite understanding of the game and how to play.
But there’s another element of his intelligence that has shown up in these first few games that I think is just as important — the understanding that, even as smart as he is, he doesn’t actually understand it all yet.
He’s constantly looking over to the bench and to Self to make sure he knows what’s next, what to do or what they’re in and he’s comfortable enough with his own knowledge of the game that he often calls things out for his teammates, too.
Scoring ability
First things first: The dude can score. We’ve already seen that here and he showed it in abundance during his days at Purdue. It’s just that he also does so many other things so well that he doesn’t always make scoring and padding his point total his top priority.
But he’s got a pretty well-rounded offensive game, with the jump hook proving to be a favorite of his. He can hit in close or even from 6-10 feet out. And his size and strength allow him to get the space he needs to get it off over taller defenders.
He’s already 2-for-2 from 3-point range on the season, which doesn’t sound all that impressive until you realize that he made just 18 total, in 64 attempts during 147 games in his 4 seasons at Purdue.
In fact, he already has matched his total 3-point makes from all of last season. And, I’d be willing to bet that his desire to show that shot in his game is tied directly to what he heard from his brief time in NBA circles prior to coming back to Kansas. It’s a shooter’s league up there and no matter how well you do everything else, you still have to be able to shoot the ball.
I don’t think that means we’ll see TKR pulling up for a bunch of jumpers with the Jayhawks. Again, he’s too smart to do too much of that. But if he picks his spots and knocks down a few 3s throughout the season, that’ll help both his stock and the Jayhawks in the process.
Outside of that jump hook, which truly looks lethal, his best offensive production is likely to come at the rim. He has the ability to back down undersized defenders and pin them under the hoop on his way to an easy bucket and also does serious work on the glass, getting second-chance opportunities that lead to put-backs or trips to the free throw line.
If there’s one area he needs to tighten up on offense, it’s those free throws. He’s shooting just 67% at the line so far this season, with six makes on nine attempts. But that’s in line with his career average and, actually, slightly better. He was a 63% free throw shooter at Purdue.
“One of the biggest things I pride myself on is not just scoring, but versatility,” Kaufman-Renn said last week. “Every year at Purdue, I had a different role.”
Trey Kaufman-Renn grabs a board, at left, and celebrates a 3-pointer, at right. [Kansas Athletics photos]
Defense
Finally, we’ll talk a little defense, which, as you know, is the most important part of any player’s game in the eyes of Self.
TKR is never going to be mistaken as this team’s best defender. For one, he’s often guarding guys a few inches taller than him and that limits how effective he can be. For two, he doesn’t stand out that often when KU is on defense.
But the times you do notice him are often the result of him putting into practice several of the things on this list — IQ and effort chief among them.
One of TKR’s biggest strengths on the defensive end is how well he walls up, that’s standing tall and stationary and putting his hands as high as possible to make life difficult for the offensive player he’s guarding.
He’s not a shot blocker. And he knows it would be a waste of time — most of the time — for him to leave his feet and go hunting blocked shots. So he uses his smarts to wall up and tries to disrupt shots that way. He’s a presence out there and he takes up space, so they do feel him when he walls up.
Bigger, taller, more athletic guys will have less trouble against this style of defense. But it can work against plenty of players and TKR seems to have figured out exactly how to utilize it.
Away from the basket, he loves to help his teammates on ball screens. In fact, if the nickname “The Connector” doesn’t take off, he might become known as “Mr. Help & Recover” because he does this better than most players we’ve seen.
Again, that’s partly because of his athleticism and how he moves he feet and mostly because of his intelligence, understanding of the concept of defense and his willingness to do everything he can, while thinking a step or two ahead, to try to help his team get stops.
We’ve seen this play out a lot already. And here’s how it looks. TKR helps on the ball screen until the guy defending the ball handler can get through it and get back. From there, he immediately looks to get to the rim for the rebound. And even if he doesn’t grab it, he often is involved enough in the play that a KU teammate can grab the board. That won’t show up on the stat sheet as a positive play for TKR, but those who watch and see it, know exactly how important his role is in those instances.
He helps in other areas, too. Against Middle Tennesse, there was a moment when Council missed a clean box out and his man got the offensive rebound. Instead of having an easy put-back, the MTSU player immediately ran into the chest of TKR, who was there waiting to help Council out, and the play resulted in a turnover.
He’s far from perfect on this end of the floor. Or either end, really, but his mistakes are rarely from a lack of understanding or effort and they always irk him.
Against Middle Tennessee, he got caught flat-footed in the paint on a possession early in the second half and his man slipped by him for an uncontested dunk. He made up for it on the very next possession, though, catching a nice feed from Stokes to finish an easy bucket at the rim to create a net-zero situation for those 40 seconds.
He cares. He dives for loose balls, will try to tie up anyone to steal an extra possession and understands the importance of his presence on the glass on both ends of the floor.
The rest of it all just kind of comes naturally and with relative ease, simply because you’re talking about a guy who has been well coached throughout his life and always has taken pride in playing the right way.
“Just little aspects of the game and understanding the flow of the game, I think coach kind of sees that,” Kaufman-Renn explained when asked why Self might have chosen the nickname for him that he did. “Maybe just my approach to the game, to try and get people involved and understand who’s on the floor. (That’s) what we’ve kind of got going here.”
And, late arrival or not, TKR fits into all of it pretty much perfectly.
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