OU basketball: Numbers that mattered from Sooners’ big win over K-State
By Chip Rouse
Junior forward Christian James told his OU basketball teammates before Saturday’s game with Kansas State that he felt “like our season is on the line.”
And that’s the way the Sooners‘ played, for once in a long while, jumping into the lead early against a good Kansas State team and maintaining it for the next 34 minutes in an 86-77 win that ended a six-game Oklahoma losing streak.
Related Story: Sooners end 6-game losing skid-with 86-77 win over Kansas State
The victory was OU head coach Lon Kruger’s third against his alma mater in eight games over the last three seasons, and all three have been at the Lloyd Noble Center. Kruger, who coached and played at Kansas State and was a three-time Big Eight Conference Player of the Year, is 6-8 against K-State in his seven seasons at Oklahoma.
Here are some more numbers that mattered from win number one in the month of February for OU men’s basketball:
1 – Oklahoma likely needs one more win in its final two regular-season games to assure itself of a spot in the NCAA Tournament.
3 – The win was just Oklahoma’s third in 12 games since losing 87-69 at Kansas State in mid-January.
Oklahoma Sooners Basketball
7 – Oklahoma’s rebounding margin (40-330 over Kansas State in the game
10 – Trae Young scored 28 points against a swarming K-State defense on just 11 shots. The Sooner super freshman made seven of them and six were long three-point rainbows.
15 – The Sooners’ largest lead in the game, 55-40, five minutes into the second half.
22 – Points scored off the Sooner bench, a big turnaround from the stretch of games in which the Sooners lost nine of 11 games.
32 – Combination of points and rebounds by OU big men Jamuni McNeace (10, 9) and Khadeem Lattin (7, 6).
36 – Consecutive free throw made by Trae Young before he missed one in the second half. He finished with 8 of 10 from the free-throw line in the game.
52.7 – OU’s shooting percentage in Saturday’s game. The Sooners have not shot that well since a Feb. 3 loss at Texas, the first of Oklahoma’s six straight losing efforts. OU shot 51.6 percent in a 79-74 loss to the Longhorns.
10,691 – Estimated attendance at Lloyd Noble Center for the Kansas State game.