Oklahoma basketball: Numbers that matter from a nightmare game
By Chip Rouse
Men’s Oklahoma basketball has scored more than100 points four times this season. On Monday night, the Sooners had that done to them.
The Kansas Jayhawks shot a sizzling 61 percent and took no prisoners in a 104-74 shellacking of a downtrodden Oklahoma team that has lost six consecutive games and finds itself in real danger of being left out of the NCAA Tournament. The Sooners were 14-2 in early January, but have disappeared since then, going 2-9 over their last 11 games.
This game may have been decided in the first three minutes, during which the Big 12 co-leaders raced out to a 10-0 advantage. Oklahoma missed its first shots, including a breakaway layup by Trae Young (a very early sign that this game was not going to go well) and turned the ball over on two other offensive possessions.
Meanwhile, the Jayhawks brought the sellout Allen Fieldhouse crowd to its feet from the start, hitting four of its first six shots in the game, and leaving the whiplashed Sooners seeking shelter from the oncoming tornado on the Kansas plains. What head coach Lon Kruger and his Sooners didn’t realize then was those were just the forward winds preceding the full-blown storm.
The last time a team scored 100 points on an Oklahoma men’s team was in January 2016 in the epic triple-overtime game at KU’s Allen Fieldhouse, won by the Jayhawks, 109-106, , despite a 46-point performance by Buddy Hield, in a much closer encounter.
Here are some other numbers that mattered from a game that Kansas head coach Bill Self referred to as “redemption” not “revenge.”
9 – Kansas had nine steals against OU, led by the Jayhawk big man, Udoka Azubuike, with three.
11 – Season-points by OU’s Trae Young, who made just 3 of 13 shots, a shooting percentage of .230.
15 – Combine blocked shots (6) and steals (9) by Kansas on Monday night against Oklahoma.
17 – Missed shots frequently lead to transition baskets at the other end. Kansas had 17 fast-break points against Oklahoma on Monday night.
18 – Career-high points by OU junior Jamuni McNeace on 8 of 11 shooting.
18-8 – The Kansas advantage in bench scoring against Oklahoma. Three Oklahoma starters came off the bench in this game (Khadeem Lattin, Rashard Odomes and Brady Manek), but only scored a total of eight points in 40 combined minutes.
39:13 – For the second consecutive game, Oklahoma did not lead the entire way. Kansas led for 39:13. The remaining 47 seconds was when the game was tied 0-0 before Kansas scored the opening points.
46 – The vast majority of Kansas’ points in Monday’s game came from either three-point shots or slam dunks. The Jayhawks scored nearly half (46) of their 104 points in the paint.
300 – The win was number 300 in Big 12 play by the Kansas Jayhawks. Only two other teams have as many as 200 Big 12 wins (Oklahoma and Texas).
16,300 – Attendance at Kansas’ Allen Fieldhouse for the game, the largest crowd for an Oklahoma basketball game this season.