Oklahoma Basketball: Sooners Seem to Have Lost Their Way, as Losses Mount
By Chip Rouse
The signs have been there for the last couple of weeks, and now what everyone hoped would be just an off-game has evolved into disturbing trend for Oklahoma basketball.
No team has shot the three-ball better this season than Oklahoma, and in their three losses in the last two weeks, no team has fared as poorly as the Sooners from the perimeter.
The Sooners have thrived most of the season on their impressive ability to score and score aplenty with the three-point shot, hitting close to 50 percent of their long-range attempts from beyond the arc for most of the season. That is, until they weren’t, which has been the case over the past four games, resulting in three, and very close to four, consecutive defeats.
In their last three losses – to Kansas State, Kansas and Texas Tech on Wednesday – OU shot 25 percent, 33 percent and 27 percent, respectively, from three-point range. That is not going to win many games, especially when almost half of your shots in the game are put up from behind the arc.
So what has happened to change things so drastically for the country’s former No. 1 team, and at a very critical time in the regular season, with seedings for the conference tournament and postseason play hanging perilously in the balance?
The simple answer is that Lon Kruger’s guys are relying too much on the high-percentage three-point shot, and now that they’ve collectively hit a cold spell in that department, the Sooners are paying the price in a conference that features tremendous parity and easily could have seven out of 10 teams receive NCAA Tournament bids this season.
I’m afraid, though, that Oklahoma’s current problems run much deeper than simply their recent inability to sink three-point shots.
Responding to reporters’ questions after the loss on Wednesday at Texas Tech, Kruger was adamant that the Sooners must do a better job in offensive rebounding.
“(We’ve) got to get loose balls. We’ve got to get missed shots back. There’s no question about that,” the OU head coach said. “When you don’t do that in a late-game situation, you’re just stacking the odds against you.
“We’ve got to bounce back and figure how to better ourselves.” —Lon Kruger, OU head coach
“We gave up too many possessions in the last few possessions (at Texas Tech). We can’t afford to do that,” he said.
Despite falling to the upset-minded and unranked Red Raiders, Kruger still believes his team is playing with plenty of confidence and not playing not to lose. “We played really well,” he said. That’s certainly debatable. “We played with a lot of confidence, (but) we’ve got to bounce back and figure out how to better ourselves.”
They’re not going to have much turnaround time to find that missing Sooner Magic before heading off to face No. 10-ranked West Virginia, the Big 12’s second best team at the moment based on the league standings.
Another contributing factor that I see in the Sooners’ current slump on the hardwood is the amount of cumulative minutes put in so far this season by Oklahoma’s veteran starting five. They’ve logged plenty of minutes, and there has been very limited contribution from the Sooner reserves, so Kruger has not had the luxury of resting his starters for very long unless they encounter foul trouble.
No one on off the Oklahoma bench is averaging more than 3.5 points per game. That may not be a huge problem when we get to postseason play because of all of the TV timeouts, but it has been a factor in OU’s lack of production over the last four-to-five outings.
The bottom line is: The Sooners have to find solutions and fast or they run the risk of turning what was looking like a milestone season into a lamentable afterthought.