Rock, talk, Jayhawk: Kansas’ Christian Braun backs up his swagger with star-level production
By CJ Moore
https://theathletic.com/3105045/2022/02 ... ed_article
LAWRENCE, Kan. — There are two Christian Brauns.
Off the court, he’s “more reserved and quiet,” his dad says.
“So respectful,” Kansas coach Bill Self says.
And then there’s the Christian Braun on the court …
“Bro,” Jayhawks teammate Ochai Agbaji says, “he’s a whole different guy. He’s like an asshole.”
The examples are starting to pile up. We got a sneak peek in last year’s Champion’s Classic, when Braun dunked on former Kentucky big man Isaiah Jackson’s head and called him a not-so-nice word on the way down. Earlier this season, a similar scene played out against Dayton, when Toumani Camara was the on-your-head victim. Braun paused when he landed and pointed at Camara to make sure everyone knew he was the one. There was the game at Kansas State two weeks ago, when after about three hours of listening to “F— KU” chants, Braun raced to get the basketball as the buzzer sounded and tossed it into the crowd. And then, of course, there were the courtside hecklers at Oklahoma whom Braun had words for after he buried the game-deciding 3.
That scene in Norman resembled something that took place 30 years ago when his mom, Lisa, was a guard at Missouri, and the OU student section, known as the Roughnecks, used to call her Miss Maybelline. “They’d talk shit to us all game,” says Lisa Braun (nee Sandbothe). “When you hear it over and over and over, and you hit a shot like that, it’s just the natural reaction.”
Christian gets his orneriness from mom. His on-court feistiness is a lot like that of Lisa and her brother, Mike, an enforcer at Missouri in the late 1980s. “Very competitive,” Lisa says. “Sometimes our competitiveness comes out of our mouth.”
This season, it has come pouring out of Braun. The junior wing has earned the right to be a little pompous. He’s gone from spot-up shooter/dirty work guy to a rim-hating slasher/dirty work guy. That second part of the equation will never change. That’s the Sandbothe in him. Self raves about his toughness and calls him the best player he’s ever been around at tracking down 50-50 balls, an attribute that is like Bill Self catnip.
Self also loves guys who show some personality on the floor. He’d rather reel them in than have to pump them up. In fact, the coach is Braun’s No. 1 needler. They go back and forth constantly in practice. Self will ask him if he’s going to make a shot today. “Damn,” Self will say. “Waiting on you.”
After Braun proceeds to make four in a row, he’ll fire off a smart-ass comeback. “I think that’s four in row if I’m not mistaken.”
“He’s that guy all the time,” Self says.
The rest of the country is seeing it now. Braun is approaching college basketball villain status. Self even brings up former Mizzou guard Jason Sutherland, who was probably the most hated man in the history of the old Big Eight. When the possibility of Braun becoming KU’s version of that guy comes up, he grins out of the side of his mouth. “I like that feeling,” he says.
“Looooooves it,” Self says.
“It fuels him,” Lisa says.
. . .
The Braun kids were split. The oldest boy, Parker, latched onto Mizzou. Christian loved the Jayhawks. It didn’t hurt that he was growing up in Burlington, Kansas, and local star Tyrel Reed played at KU. Reed’s sister, Lacie, babysat the Brauns, and Tyrel used to come over to play basketball with the boys. He even brought Cole Aldrich to Christian’s seventh birthday.
At Christmas time, the Brauns put up a small tree that had both Kansas and Missouri decorations. Eventually, it had to be a KU-only tree, because Christian, according to Lisa, would take off the Missouri ornaments and stomp them.
Parker spent his first three years playing for the Tigers, but he was never able to get consistent minutes and transferred this offseason to Santa Clara, where he’s starting for a team that owns wins over TCU, Stanford and BYU.
Christian was frustrated that Parker never really got a chance at Mizzou. He thought his brother would show flashes when he’d get on the floor, and he’d call Parker and ask, “Why aren’t you playing?”
From the stories his brother told him, Christian was convinced the Mizzou coaches didn’t think Parker was tough enough. He grew up playing in a small rural town and then the suburbs of Kansas City.
“I felt like it maybe it was a grit thing,” Christian says. “Maybe it was a toughness thing. Maybe it was something that they thought guys didn’t have that where he grew up. I took it personally.”
Christian doesn’t want this to sound disrespectful — he says he has a lot of respect for Tigers coach Cuonzo Martin — but he wanted to prove a point when the two teams met in Lawrence on Dec. 11.
His plan was to wait until Kansas had a 10-point lead before he said a word. But about a minute into the game, he found himself open in front of the Mizzou bench and fired in a 3. He couldn’t help himself. His head swiveled right toward that bench, and the talking started. “I just can’t keep it in,” he says. “I don’t know what it is.”
Next possession: an Agbaji 3. More Braun barking. Another minute later, Braun blocked a shot and then made an and-one layup in transition, ending up sliding on his butt along the baseline, turning toward the student section and banging his chest. The camera cut to his parents. Donny, the quieter one, was making his statement by wearing a Santa Clara shirt. Lisa was talking right along with her son.
Braun scored eight of KU’s first 11 points, had three assists and forced a shot-clock violation all before the second media timeout. He let out so much emotion in that opening stretch that he was exhausted. Obviously, all the buckets felt good, but it was the way he played in Kansas’ 102-65 victory— the hustle plays, keeping his chest in front of ball handlers, grabbing loose balls — that really made his point.
“I thought it was my job to show them (what they were missing),” Braun says. “I really wanted to show them that it doesn’t really matter where you’re from. If you love basketball, if you play hard, you can have grit. And I think I showed them that.”
. . .
Once in the fifth grade, when Lisa was coaching the boys, he made the mistake of running his mouth to his mom after messing up in a game. She told him to sit his butt on the bench. He kept going. She told him to go to the end of the bench. He kept going. She handed someone her car keys and told him, “Get your ass to the truck now. Don’t come back in.”
“Nothing’s changed,” Donny says, laughing as they recall the story. “She just sends him to his own car now.”
They’re both stubborn, but Lisa’s hard coaching shaped him. Christian feared no one, and he did everything on the floor that coaches loved — taking charges, diving for loose balls, you name it. There was no fake hustle, because his mom would see right through that.
“Coach Self can’t shock me with anything he’s going to say,” Christian says, “because my mom has said worse.”
It made him prepared for any battle, internal or external. On the floor, he spent most of his childhood as the little guy. When he started playing for the Kansas City grassroots outfit MOKAN, current teammate Dajuan Harris towered over him. (Harris, for those unaware, is one of the smallest guys in the Big 12.)
As a freshman in high school, Christian was only 5-foot-8. It ended up paying off because he developed as a point guard, and that likely would have gone differently if he’d always been the tall kid. In Burlington, his size didn’t matter because he was still one of the best players, but the Brauns went seeking the best competition for their boys. That’s why Christian joined MOKAN in seventh grade, and why the Brauns moved to Overland Park at the start of Christian’s freshman year.
With MOKAN, the coaches considered demoting him from the top team, but they ended up deciding he could handle not playing as much.
“There were times where I was not good, but I still wanted to compete,” Braun says. “I went through times where I’d sit the bench, didn’t get in, but every time I got on the court, I thought I was the toughest dude out there.”
Braun proved that was the case in the summer between eighth and ninth grade when he broke his hand going for a loose ball. The fracture required the insertion of a screw. Once he had the procedure done, he would have to sit out for a while. He refused, playing the rest of the summer season with the broken hand and putting off surgery.
His right wrist bothered him over the last couple months of last season. His parents would tell him to go have it examined. “He doesn’t want to know,” Lisa says. “He’s like, if I can get through it, I’ll be all right.”
Braun has not missed a game in college, and Self says he never misses practice.
“I don’t know that the dude has taken two possessions off since he’s been here in practice,” Self says. “He gets hit in the mouth, he gets a knee to the thigh, he gets the wind knocked out of him, and he won’t even think about going to see a trainer.”
Braun’s emotional toughness was tested when Lisa decided to move the boys to Overland Park. It’s something the Brauns had considered for a while, and Lisa made the executive decision while Donny was on a business trip, renting an apartment near Blue Valley Northwest, considered one of the best basketball programs in the city, and enrolling the boys. Their first day was the second day of school.
They didn’t know anyone and would meet up between classes to say hello to each other, then spend the rest of the day not talking to anybody.
Christian never questioned it. If it was best for his basketball development, then he was all for it. In Burlington, he would have been the big fish in a small pond. At BVNW, he split time between the freshman and junior varsity teams. As a sophomore, he was the ninth man and didn’t play a lot on a state championship team. He never questioned the process, always willing to wait his turn.
His turn came in his junior year. Eight games into that season, with BVNW at 4-4, coach Ed Fritz moved him to point guard, and the Huskies won 17 straight and repeated as state champions.
It was that summer that Braun finally elevated himself to starter for MOKAN and a player that Kansas would actually recruit. It wasn’t just because he was the hometown kid. He’d sprouted to 6-7, and 6-7 guys with ball skills will play at the high-major level. But it was the intangibles and his swagger that sold Self. “I always thought he thought he was the best player on every court,” Self says.
The true Braun really came out his senior season at BVNW, where he was the unquestioned star and leader. During timeouts, Fritz would talk for about 45 seconds and then leave the final 20 seconds for Braun.
“CB would hold you accountable,” Fritz says. “He’s not afraid to call out a teammate. He’s not afraid to call out himself. He’s not afraid to call out a coach, and it’s all for the betterment of the team.”
Fritz says he’s only coached three or four players with a presence like Braun; one of them was Clayton Custer, who went on to play point guard at Loyola Chicago and lead the Ramblers to the Final Four.
While Braun delivered the truth, he also expected it in return. During his recruitment, he hated the approach of most coaches, who would promise shots, playing time and anything else they thought he’d want to hear.
“That’s what I loved about Coach Self, because he was completely honest,” he says. “I wanted to come here my whole life, so whatever he told me was going to be great. He told me, ‘Hey, Christian, I’m going to be honest with you. I’m not gonna promise you a minute, a shot. I’m not going to promise you a single thing.’”
Braun was a four-star recruit, but his signing wasn’t one that got KU fans going crazy. The way he remembers it, most fans thought he’d end up redshirting. Instead, he played 18.4 minutes per game as a freshman and even started five games. That was quite the accomplishment, considering the Jayhawks ended that COVID-19 shortened season ranked No. 1 and were the favorite to win the national title.
Braun was so good shooting the ball as a freshman — he made 45.6 percent of his 3s — that his reputation became that of a spot-up shooter who made the hustle plays. He filled the same responsibility as a sophomore, though his shooting numbers dropped a bit. He wasn’t displeased with his role — “I adjusted to what we needed,” he says — but he felt like he was capable of more.
“His goal was not to be a hometown hero,” Lisa says. “His goal is to go to the next level.”
To take the next step, he needed to get back to playing more like he did in high school. But listen to how he explains it. Some players come off suggesting that someone else held them back.
Braun?
“It wasn’t something that the coaches made me into,” he says. “I felt like, I need to go be athletic and go be who I was. It’s not even just going and making plays off the bounce; it’s just making dunks and highlight plays like that, showing off athleticism.”
Self told him to make sure he spent his offseason working on the things that would allow him to show it off in games, so that was his focus.
It’s obvious to anyone who has watched Kansas play this year that Braun has succeeded. It took only 11 games for him to make more 2s than he’d made his first two seasons combined. He’s thrived in transition and as a cutter. Among players who have finished at least 20 possessions off a cut, he’s the eighth-most efficient on those plays (scoring 1.654 points per possession) in the country, per Synergy. That’s usually the territory of big men who finish a lot of lobs and dump-offs. The counting stats — 15.1 points, 5.7 rebounds, 3.2 assists and more than a block and a steal per game — are strong as well. Braun has scored in double digits in 19 of 21 games this season for Kansas, which hosts Baylor on Saturday with first place in the Big 12 at stake.
All that has resulted in Braun showing up on mock drafts.
Self says Braun is playing exactly how he wants him to play with one exception. “I wish he’d look for his shot a little bit more,” Self says.
Reed, once a hero to Braun, now sees him regularly. The former Jayhawks guard is a physical therapist and works with the team, which allows him to attend many practices and sit back and observe. One thing he’s noticed with Braun is that every teammate looks at him like he’s their best friend.
“Everyone wants to play with him,” Reed says. “Everyone wants to hang around him.”
We’re all drawn to confidence, and Braun obviously has that. But while he comes off as somewhat cocky on the floor, it’s more understated around his team. Self says Braun is always talking up other guys.
“A sign of true confidence is not being jealous of anybody,” Self says. “He’s that guy.”
It’s the perfect dynamic with this year’s Jayhawks. Agbaji is the best wing in college basketball, but he’s never one to promote himself. It’s OK, because he’s got Braun to do that for him. Every opportunity Braun gets, he praises Agbaji. In an interview for this story, Braun ended up gushing about how good Agbaji has been and why.
Agbaji is by default this team’s leader because of his age, wisdom and talent, but the Jayhawks take their emotional cues from Braun. Even Agbaji has shown more emotion in recent weeks, letting out some screams after big buckets.
With Braun, the noises are a little different. “He’ll be talking crazy,” Agbaji says, so much so that Braun cannot even recall what he said after the fact.
“I just enjoy the moment,” he says. “I don’t shy away from it.”
He also doesn’t shy away from taking on all the venom from an opposing fan bases. And Harris has a warning for those who take the bait.
“They’re going to have to deal with it,” Harris says, “because that’s a bad boy.”
