Mitch’s impact despite not playing

I think being a great team mate is one of the more overlooked parts of having a winning team. You see it all the time in pro sports where a player is a superstar but the teams he plays on don't win big or consistently. The whole team has to buy into that team mentality.

Tarik Black comes to mind. Tarik came in for his graduate year from Memphis and essentially knew that he'd be "training" Joel Embiid, and as Embiid got better, Black would lose playing time to him.

Nevetheless he did the job and did the job well.

I was highly suspicious of picking up Black for one season and kind of wondered if it was the right thing to do. Since then, he's become one of my favorite Jayhawks and a great success story. He went undrafted, but tried out for a bunch of NBA teams, made the summer league, played his tail off, and landed a spot in the NBA where he still plays today. Love that kind of stuff.

Lightfoot will have similar success. I'm hoping that he'll get to play more of his natural position of a small forward in his upcoming years at KU. While he's probably not an future NBA guy, he's certainly somebody that HCBS can trust to come in ready to play, and his energy and work ethic will serve him well in whatever he decides to do in life.