Oklahoma Basketball Stat of the Week: 90
By Chip Rouse
College basketball, like in all sports, has its own numbering system. There are metrics and measures for all aspects of the game, but a number by itself doesn’t tell the whole story. Take the Oklahoma basketball stat of the week: 90.
In the case of Oklahoma basketball in 2015-16, the number 90 does not represent the team’s scoring average or the free-throw percentage of one of the Sooner players.
It does, however, have something special to say about a very special Sooner player in Buddy Hield. The OU All-American and four-year starter is on his way to becoming perhaps the greatest player in Oklahoma basketball history.
His 1,781 career points place him eighth on the all-time Oklahoma scoring leaderboard. At his current pace, Hield is a good bet to climb to at least fourth place on the OU career scoring list. He has scored 416 points so far this season with about half the season still to go and trails Daryl Kennedy, currently the fourth leading scorer on the career list, by just 316 points. That would put Hield behind only Wayman Tisdale, Jeff Webster and Tim McCalister on the all-time OU leaderboard.
Forty-five percent of his 1,782 total points have come as three-point shots from over 19-feet away from the basket. Hield is shooting the long-range shot with incredible accuracy this season, hitting 52 percent of his three-point attempts, which is fourth-best in the country (his teammate Jordan Woodard ranks third, by the way, shooting 55 percent from behind the three-point line).
Hield has made more than 90 three-pointers in each of the last two seasons, and is on a pace to blow by that number this season. He is already the only Oklahoma player to make 90 or more three-pointers in a season two times in his career. At his current pace, he will make somewhere close to 118 treys this season, which would easily break the single-season record by an OU player, held by Nate Erdmann, who made 105 three-pointers in the first season of the Big 12 in 1996-97.