Oklahoma head basketball coach Lon Kruger has been blessed with the same starting five for three full seasons.
Things will change dramatically for the Sooners next season, however, which is both a little scary and somewhat stimulative.
Either way, Kruger, who is will be in his sixth season as the Sooners’ head coach, knows it will be an adjustment for everybody – the coaches, the players and the fans.
“It’ll be a new squad, a new identity.” That is how Kruger summed up the challenge and the opportunity facing the Oklahoma Sooners next season in a summer teleconference with the Big 12 men’s basketball coaches.
The Sooners are coming off of one of their best seasons in program history. The 2015-16 OU squad, led by All-American Buddy Hield and two other seniors who, along with junior Jordan Woodard, started 105 consecutive games over three season, won 29 games, capped off by a trip to the NCAA Final Four.
“The guys returning have to be careful not to think that it’s just going to happen again or continue like it has been.
Only two players return off of last year’s starting five – point guard Woodard and 6-foot, 9-inch forward Khadeem Lattin. Woodard will be a senior and Lattin a junior.
That’s not the only adjustment the Sooners are going to have to make, though, going into next season. In addition to three new starters, Oklahoma also is breaking in two new assistant coaches on Kruger’s staff.
Longtime Kruger assistants Steve Henson and Lew Hill, left after the 2015-16 season to become head coaches at the University of Texas-San Antonio and Texas-Rio Grande Valley, respectively. Both assistants came to Oklahoma in 2011 from UNLV, where they served on Kruger’s staff at that school for seven seasons.
Kruger’s son, Kevin, and Carlin Hartman have joined the Sooner coaching staff replacing Henson and Hill.
Kevin played at Arizona State and under his father at UNLV. The past two seasons, he was an assistant at Northern Arizona. Hartman spent the past two seasons as an assistant coach at Rice.
The new assistant coaches should “make the transition very smoothly and quickly,” Kruger said during Wednesday’s teleconference. “The summertime helps with that, too. It helps with our players to spend some time, and it also helps with the new coaches getting comfortable with our guys.”