Hunter Dickinson shares injury update on his shoulder ahead of NCAA Tournament

The Kansas basketball team will open the NCAA Tournament on Thursday night against Samford and when it does it’ll have big man Hunter Dickinson available to play.

Dickinson has been battling a shoulder injury but said he’s good to go for this one.

“The shoulder feels good. Good enough to be out there with my teammates,” Dickinson said. “I feel like everybody’s dealing with a little injury nowadays, especially toward the end of the season. So I feel good and ready to get out there with my teammates.”

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The talented big man has put in plenty of work rehabbing the shoulder, knowing he needs to do everything he can to give himself a chance to play. Kansas certainly needs him.

Dickinson has averaged 18.0 points per game and a team-leading 10.8 boards per contest, while also dishing out 2.2 assists and recording 1.4 blocks per game. He does it all.

He’ll have to be on his ‘A’ game against the Bulldogs, because the Jayhawks will be without their other star.

Guard Kevin McCullar won’t play in the NCAA Tournament due to a knee injury that just hasn’t recovered the way he would have hoped. But the team is ready to rally around the missing guard.

“I think we were obviously all hoping he would play, because he’s one of the best players not just on our team but in the country,” Dickinson said. “But we’ve seen the amount of work that he’s put in to try to get back, especially me personally, because I was rehabbing my shoulder and my knees and my hips and stuff like that. So I was in the training room with him. And he’s been doing two to three sessions every day for the past like two months. So it’s not his fault by any means.

“But it just wasn’t feeling right. I was with him when he was trying it out, and he was just going through a lot of pain. I wish the best for him. Hope that he can get back as soon as possible, but I feel like we’ve got a good group of guys that are going to try to rally around him and try to win a couple games here for him.”

Kansas will enter the NCAA Tournament game against Samford as a 6.5-point favorite, according to odds listed by FanDuel. The game is scheduled to tip off at 9:55 p.m. ET on TBS.