By: D. Scott Fritchen
You wonder what makes Arthur Kaluma tick, how he became a Consensus Top-50 high school prospect, how he helped Creighton to two NCAA Tournament appearances and the school’s first trip to the Elite Eight in 2022-23, and how he erupted with 23 points in his first-ever Kansas State game against the Israeli Select Team during the Wildcats’ summer overseas tour.
It’s simple, really.
“It’s maintaining a basketball state of mind,” Kaluma says.
The 6-foot-7, 225-pound Kaluma stands on the hardwood near center court at the T-Mobile Center in Kansas City, Missouri. It’s Big 12 Media Day. Bright lights illuminate the Big 12 Championship Trophy. Kaluma, a junior, is a Preseason Honorable Mention All-Big 12 selection and was recently named to the preseason watch list for the Julius Erving Small Forward Award. He stands alone in his purple jersey sharing the same light. A crowd of coaches, players and personnel walk around the basketball court. It’s like a movie. But this is reality. And, so, you ask Kaluma if he can gauge his potential this season at K-State. And in the Big 12. He looks you in the eyes.
“My potential?” he says. “Man, I feel like I can be one of the greatest players. But I feel like everybody has to have that mindset to get to where they want to get to in life.”
Kaluma has dreams. Big dreams. As an early entrant into the 2023 NBA Draft, Kaluma worked out with teams in May before opting to continue his collegiate career. The teams told him to work on his consistency. Yet he came away with a belief only reaffirmed by his performance against NBA-quality competitors.
“I felt a supreme confidence,” Kaluma says. “When you go through the draft process and play against people who you’ve seen get drafted and hold yourself to a high standard, you feel like, ‘I can play against anybody.’”
And now he’s brought his talents to Manhattan.
“I might be ‘honorable mention,’ but my goal this season is to take the ‘honorable mention’ out,” he says. “I want to be All-Big 12.”
And so much more.
Kaluma came to K-State after two noteworthy seasons at Creighton. Kaluma was selected to the BIG EAST All-Freshman Team at Creighton, and he scored 24 points and grabbed 12 rebounds against Kansas in the 2022 NCAA Tournament, and he was on the watch list for the Karl Malone Power Forward of the Year Award as a sophomore, and he dropped a career-high 27 points on BYU, and he had back-to-back double-doubles against Seton Hall and UConn this past season.
He averaged 11.1 points (43.3% shooting, including 29.1% on 3-pointers and 71.4% on free throws), 5.7 rebounds, 1.5 assists, 0.6 steals, 0.6 blocks in 28.2 minutes per appearance while playing in 68 games with 67 starts at Creighton. He scored in double figures in 40 games, including all four games in the 2022 NCAA Tournament.
But Kaluma wanted something more. It was while working out with the Boston Celtics as an early entrant for the NBA Draft in May that Kaluma, who had entered the transfer portal, learned that Jerome Tang, 2023 National Coach of the Year, was seeking to fill out his 2023-24 roster with experienced talent in Manhattan.
“Once we got on a Zoom call with my family and the coaching staff, I knew we had to visit this place,” Kaluma says. “It was the first place we visited. On the visit, everything that they’d laid out, and everything they’d talked about, and their belief system — we knew that this was the place for me to be.”
Here’s what Kaluma thought about the first time he laid his head on his pillow his first night in Manhattan: “I’m home.”
“I felt like if I make the most out of this situation, I can get everything I want out of it, and I can help lead people to where they want to go, too,” he says. “I’m being grounded in where I’m at and staying present in the moment to get to where I need to get to.”
It’s that basketball state of mind.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Kaluma lived in Los Angeles, then Dallas, Texas, and then he moved to Glendale, Arizona, where he starred at Dream City Christian. He averaged 24.7 points and 9.7 rebounds during the 2020-21 season, blowing up as a Consensus Top-50 prospect (“I could’ve been a Consensus Top 10 if I’d been able to play AAU that last year, but COVID stopped it,” he says).
“Man, my height, God blessed me with height, and my parents had great athletic ability, so at a young age I was a pretty good athlete,” he says. “I felt like if I kept going, I could go where I wanted to go in life. I wanted to get to big stages and hopefully get to the NBA. That’s my main goal. Just basketball, just keeping it simple, and having fun.”
Without the option of taking official visits due to the COVID pandemic, Kaluma selected Creighton over offers from Kansas, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Syracuse, UNLV and USC among others, ultimately choosing the Bluejays and head coach Greg McDermott, who suggested that Kaluma would gain serious playing time. Kaluma sought those instant minutes to show his talent to NBA scouts.
“Coach Mac is a great coach, and his basketball IQ is amazing,” Kaluma says. “Not many people have a basketball mind like that. I learned everything I needed to be successful.”
Kaluma also played for Uganda in the 2021 AfroBasket and 2023 FIBA World Cup African Qualifiers, averaging 22.5 points 5.0 rebounds and 3.0 assists in a pair of first-round games with Cape Verde and Nigeria in July 2022.
“A surreal experience, for sure,” he says. “It was amazing. My teammates were all grown men. They were such a good group of people. It’s hard to find a genuine group of players who want to see each other succeed. It’s cool I was able to find that in my home country.”
It was a lasting experience, for sure, along a path that eventually took him overseas again — this time as a member of the K-State basketball team, which departed August 9 and spent three nights in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and four nights in Abu Dhabi.
Kaluma started things off with 23 points in a 94-87 win over the Israeli Select Team in Tel Aviv.
“I wanted to establish myself, but I didn’t want to come off a selfish,” Kaluma says. “I feel like I was able to get my teammates involved, but I also had it going on the offensive end. We didn’t run many plays out there, but we got to see which shots coaches liked, and I got to test the waters to see where my teammates like their spots and try to find out what to expect from them. It was a great first game and we got the W, so it was a great experience.”
In a matter of weeks, Kaluma was immersed in the K-State basketball program’s Shark Week — a high-intensity and grueling conditioning regimen. Wednesday’s session came with an added twist.
“We usually did our own little conditioning drills and did our running, and at the end of it, we usually clap it up,” Kaluma says. “This time, Coach put a big projector in the gym. He told us to get into defensive stance and he started playing the K-State Victory song, and we had to sing the song for four minutes while we maintained our defensive stance. Man, that was very impressionable.”
The players did it together. They did it as a family.
“I feel like we are one big family,” Kaluma says. “Honestly, that’s thanks in part to the coaching staff and all the team events we do and how team-oriented they are in practice. If one of us is failing, we’re all failing, so we have to pick each other up. That’s huge in our program. The environment they’ve created is so fun to be around.”
The Wildcats soon get down to business with their exhibition game against Emporia State on Wednesday followed by their official season opener against USC in Las Vegas on November 6.
“That’s going to be super fun,” Kaluma says. “USC is going to be a good team. It’ll be good to see where we are as a team and what we need to improve upon. It’ll be fun to finally beat up on someone else.”
Through it all, Kaluma intends to maintain his same mindset.
And that, simply put, is what makes him tick.
“Trials come,” he says. “It’s not always going to be sunshine and rainbows. Confidence can ebb and flow, but the one thing that can maintain your wellbeing is having that basketball state of mind, and that’s trying to be consistent every single day doing what you have to do in order to get better.
“There can be no wasted day.”
Always a basketball state of mind.