Oklahoma Basketball: Sizing Up the Sooners a Third of the Way Through the Season
By Chip Rouse
Nine games does not a season make, but it does represent a third of the journey and a good time to size up where things are headed for Oklahoma basketball just a couple of weeks out from the tip off of the season’s main feature: Big 12 Conference play.
The Sooner men are 6-3 through nine games. One of the three losses was decisive (a 20-point, 90-70 defeat to then No. 14 Wisconsin), but the other two were very winnable had the young Oklahoma squad not failed to finish at crunch time.
This is the worst start of any of coach Lon Kruger’s five previous Oklahoma teams through nine games. Last season’s Sooner team, which advanced all the way to the Final Four, including a 23-point win over eventual national champion Villanova in the regular season, began the 2015-16 campaign 12-0 before losing its first game, in three overtimes to Kansas.
Two other OU teams under Kruger (2011-12 and 2013-14) went 8-1 through nine games and two opened the season winning seven of their first nine contests.
Senior guard Jordan Woodard leads the Sooners in scoring, averaging 17.1 of Oklahoma’s 79.7 points per game. He is the only Sooner in the top 15 scoring leaders in the Big 12 at this point in the season.
Three other Oklahoma players are averaging in double figures in the scoring column: sophomore guard Christian James (12.3 points per game),sophomore guard Rashard Odomes (10.0) and junior forward Khadeem Lattin (10.0). A year ago, the Sooners had four players finish the season in double figures, led by National Player of the Year and All-American Buddy Hield, who averaged a Big 12-best 25.0 points per game.
As a team, Oklahoma is shooting 47 percent from the field, which is two points better than it did for the full season a year ago. The Sooners are fourth in the Big 12 in three-point percentage (40.2), but next to last in the conference in rebounding margin (plus 4.1) and dead last in turnover margin (plus 0.2) as well as turnovers committed per game (14.9).
The Sooners’ 70.6 free-throw percentage ranks fourth in the Big 12, but they have three players in the top-five in the league in free-throw percentage: Woodard (84 percent) and Kristian Doolittle (82 percent) are second and third in the conference, respectively, and Lattin is fifth (79 percent).
You are what the numbers say you are, and in this case they say that the Oklahoma men are performing right around the middle of the pack in the Big 12. That is pretty much where the league coaches projected the Sooners would wind up when all is said and done in the 2016-17 season. Oklahoma was picked to finish sixth in the conference, which would put them on the bubble as far as a fifth consecutive NCAA Tournament appearance.
There is plenty of season remaining and an entire Big 12 schedule to play out, but right now Oklahoma men’s basketball has a lot of work to do to reach the bar set by previous OU teams under Kruger.