Wayne Selden’s breakout season has made Kansas college basketball’s No. 1 team

As is typically the case when the top two teams in the country are on the court at the same time, there will be no shortage of star power on display when Kansas and Oklahoma square off against one another Monday night inside Allen Fieldhouse.

None of those guys are the one Bill Self recently called “hands down” the Jayhawks’ best player.

If you were a casual college basketball fan who had assumed that Wayne Selden had already moved on to greener pastures or was still mired in a mediocre amateur career, well, that would be understandable. McDonald’s All-Americans don’t typically stay at Kansas for more than a season or two nowadays, and if they do, it’s usually because they’re never going to fully realize the potential that made them one of the most highly sought-after high school players in the country. It’s a trend that Selden, a predicted star heading into each of the past two seasons, has been bucking since the middle of November.

Thirteen games into a “show me” season, Selden finds himself as the leader in points per game (15.5) and field goal percentage (55.5 percent) on a team that scores more (88.8 ppg) than all but two others in Division-I and is the freshly crowned No. 1 in the Associated Press Top 25.

The surprise surrounding Selden’s play to this point isn’t rooted in a lack of potential or expectations, it’s based on how far the junior came from realizing both of those things in his first two college tries.

A disappointing season for Selden ended with his most criticized performance to date when he missed all five of his field goal attempts and failed to register a point in Kansas’ embarrassing 78-65 loss to Wichita State in the NCAA Tournament’s round of 32. There were more than a handful of folks in Lawrence who were resigned to label Selden as a bust and hope that another stellar recruiting class would be able to carry the Jayhawks in 2015-16.

Understandably, Kansas fans still took a “believe it when we see it” approach to Selden finally making a star turn in 2015-16. That being the case, it feels appropriate that he averaged the same number of points (19.3 ppg) at the Maui Invitational as he did in South Korea over the summer. Even though he had to share it with Frank Mason, Selden brought an MVP trophy back to the mainland with him after this tournament as well.

Since then, Selden’s star has continued to shine, especially when the stage has been the largest. He hit 8 of 12 shots and scored 22 points in a 15-point win over Oregon State on Dec. 12, and dropped a game-high 24 points in a 102-74 throttling of No. 23 Baylor on Saturday. He’ll attempt to steal the show again on Monday night in what will be college basketball’s second 1 vs. 2 game since 2008.

So what’s been the difference in year three? Selden’s head coach is willing to shoulder at least some of the blame for his new star’s unremarkable first two seasons in Lawrence.

“I think we played him out of position,” Self said recently. “I think a lot of it was (on the coaches), because we put our five best players out there, but I don’t know if the pieces really fit as well. I don’t believe we did anything to help him the first two years.”

In Self’s eyes, Selden’s struggles weren’t due solely to the fact that guys like Andrew Wiggins and Kelly Oubre were overshadowing him, they were due to the fact that those stars forced Selden to play out of his comfort zone. With surefire first-round draft picks manning the wing in each of the past two seasons, Selden was required to assume more of a ball-handler/penetrator role, an area which was not his biggest strength coming out of high school. Now he’s able to get back to his catch-and-shoot roots, and let his outside shot set up his ability to penetrate.

Still, there was no guarantee that Selden being eased back into his comfort zone would elicit the type of numbers that Jayhawk fans had been waiting more than 24 months to see. After all, the man who sports No. 1 on his jersey had taken plenty of outside shots in his first two collegiate seasons, and had shot just 32.8 percent from beyond the arc as a freshman and 36.5 percent from deep a season later.

There’s an old saying that coaches can teach a player to be a good shooter, but great shooters are born with their gift. If that’s the case, then Selden is a guy who was touched in the womb by the basketball gods but had just been going through an extended string of bad luck up to this point in his college career.

That might be as good a way as any to explain the degree to which Selden’s outside shot has improved this season. A career 34.6 percent three-point shooter when he took the court for the first time in 2015-16, Selden is currently No. 8 in the country in three-point field goal percentage (55.4 percent). He’s buried at least three triples in eight of Kansas’ 13 games, including a 5-for-6 performance from deep in the Jayhawks’ demolition of Baylor over the weekend.

“I feel like every one is going to go in when I take it, before I even shoot it,” Selden said after the Baylor win. “I feel that’s the ultimate confidence. That’s what I need and that’s what the team needs.”

Kansas fans hope that ultimate confidence will help the Jayhawks hold onto their new No. 1 ranking (and grab the other one from the coaches) seven days from now.