Trae Young on the verge of reaching a bundle of scoring milestones

Oklahoma’s super freshman Trae Young has been in the headlines throughout the college basketball season.

Now, the National Player of the Year candidate is about to etch his name in the record book, not once but multiple times. And we’re not just talking about Oklahoma program milestones, but national ones, as well.

Young, who has led the nation in both scoring and assists from the start of the 2017-18 campaign, is the only player in Division I college basketball this season to score 40 or more points in four games. He has gone over the 30-point level in nine games and has 20-plus points in 23 of the Sooners’ 28 games this season. In fact, he scored at least 20 points in 18 consecutive games at one point during the season.

Big 12 defenses, which because of the Big 12 balanced, round-robin schedule, have already faced the highly talented OU point guard at least once this season, have figured out how to limit Young’s production. But while opponents have managed to slow him down, stopping him is a completely different manner.

Young is averaging 28.3 points a game. During the Sooners’ six-game losing streak, however, his point production was down to 19.8. He was still dishing out a nation-best total of assists, but his teammates weren’t finishing on the receiving end.

Young has been exciting basketball fans in Norman, Oklahoma, where he grew up and resides, for a number of years, first at Norman North High School, where he earned McDonald’s All-America status and now on the hardwood at Lloyd Noble Center starring for the Sooners.

With three points on Tuesday against Baylor, Young will break Michael Beasley’s (Kansas State) Big 12 record for most points in a regular season.

The Sooner point guard has 793 points in 28 games. With eight more points, Young will become just the second player from a major conference to score 800 regular-season points since Duke’s J.J. Reddick did it 20 years ago. He also would become the second player to score 800 points and dish out 250 dimes in the past two decades.

At his current pace, Young will become the only player to lead the nation in both scoring and assists since the NCAA first began tracking assists in 1983.

The late, great Wayman Tisdale, himself a native of the Sooner State, is the all-time scoring leader in Oklahoma basketball history. That record is not in danger this season, but Young is only 19 points away from breaking Tisdale’s freshman scoring record of 810 points. In his freshman season at OU in 1983-84, Tisdale averaged 24.5 points, 10.3 rebounds and 2.5 blocks.

He may or may not go down as the best player in Oklahoma Sooner basketball history, but Young has clearly staked his claim as the best freshman performer in program history.

And the season is not over. But for Sooner fans, there are probably only a few more games to see Trae Young in an Oklahoma uniform. Next season, he likely will be playing the game he loves at basketball’s highest level.