KANSAS CITY — The injury concerns Kansas basketball faced pregame Wednesday extended beyond the team’s two unavailable stars.

It wasn’t just graduate senior guard Kevin McCullar Jr. and senior center Hunter Dickinson. No, the two All-Big 12 Conference first team honorees weren’t alone on the list. Graduate senior forward Parker Braun, the Jayhawks’ go-to big-man off the bench, has been nursing an ankle injury.

But when Braun was asked postgame how close he was to not playing against Cincinnati in the Big 12 tournament, he said he was good to go. After No. 6-seed Kansas (22-10) suffered a 72-52 loss against the No. 11-seed Bearcats in the second round, Braun said even if he might not be 100%, he’s going to try to be out there if he can give the team something positive. He expressed a trust in coach Bill Self that, if he was going to be a liability, the Jayhawks coach wouldn’t put him out there.

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“It’s getting better day-by-day,” Braun said as the team now looks ahead to the NCAA tournament. “So, that’s just kind of all we can really focus on at this point — is day-by-day, and try to take it one day at a time and get one percent better.”

Braun barely played more than two and a half minutes during Kansas’ lopsided defeat against Cincinnati. Looking at the stat sheet, you’d only see a defensive rebound, a missed shot from behind the arc and a block, all during a forgettable first half for the Jayhawks. But as the lone, true, scholarship big-man off of the bench behind Dickinson, Braun’s size — 6-foot-10, 235 pounds — and experience at the college level allow him to have the potential of a valuable piece if he’s healthy.

Braun hasn’t been one this season to collect a lot of stats. But with Dickinson playing major minutes, and not missing a game before Wednesday, that was never going to be Braun’s task. It was about managing things while Dickinson, also the Big 12 Newcomer of the Year, rested on the bench. Braun’s had a mix of positive and negative experiences in that regard as the season’s unfolded. But in the NCAA tournament, it’d be better for Kansas to not place the kind of load on junior forward KJ Adams Jr. it had to Wednesday.

That will also be the last stretch of play for Braun at the college level, however long the Jayhawks’ NCAA tournament stay goes. His lone season at Kansas follows stops at both Missouri, where he also came off the bench, and Santa Clara, where he was a regular starter. He didn’t directly address whether that reality played into also wanting to be available for the Big 12 tournament, but did note the team’s injury concerns meant he wants to be able to help improve the team’s overall health if he can.

“If we lose one more time, (Braun)’s done forever,” redshirt senior guard Dajuan Harris Jr. said. “So, we’ve got to get him healthy, get our other two All-Americans healthy, too — I think we’ll be back at full force. So, we’ve just got to get healthy this week and get better next week.”

Braun reiterated what’s been said by Self and others, that they are planning on Dickinson and McCullar being back. He didn’t want to speak for them, but did say it would be huge if they were and beneficial for Kansas.

Harris mused for a moment postgame about the benefit the Jayhawks could get from being able to rest more now, considering the early Big 12 tournament exit for a team that was down to seven scholarship players available — and less than that healthy. But he also mentioned that the T-Mobile Center in Kansas City is a second home to the Kansas program.

“Whoever needs to step up has to step up, and we obviously can’t take any more losses,” Braun said. “Hopefully we can just win six straight, and all of our goals are still ahead of us. So, we’re just going to try to take it one at a time, and when guys get healthy they’re going to be healthy and hopefully we can be at full strength when we need to be.”

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Jordan Guskey covers University of Kansas Athletics at The Topeka Capital-Journal. He is the National Sports Media Association’s sportswriter of the year for the state of Kansas for 2022. Contact him at jmguskey@gannett.com or on Twitter at @JordanGuskey.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Here's an update on Kansas basketball forward Parker Braun's status