Trae Young: Eleven great memories of OU’s one-time wonder

Trae Young’s career at Oklahoma was short, but the thrills and memories he is leaving behind will last a lifetime.

If you measure the men’s Oklahoma basketball season in pure wins and losses, it wasn’t one of head coach Lon Kruger’s best teams.

What looked like a sure 20-win season when the calendar turned to 2018 fell short of the mark when the Sooners ended up loosing 12 of their final 16 games.

A few day after Oklahoma lost to Rhode  Island in the opening round of this year’s NCAA Tournament, the Sooners star freshman point guard confirmed what everyone had long expected. Young announced that he would forgo his final three years of eligibility at OU and declare for the NBA Draft.

So, just like that, the former  five-star recruit and McDonald’s All-American is one-and-done in a Sooner uniform and now on his way to ply his trade at the next level, most likely as a top-10 NBA lottery pick.

Here are 11 great memories and moments provided by the former Norman North High School star who wore jersey number 11 in his one sensational season at Oklahoma:

• Trae Young led the nation this season in both scoring (27.4 points per game) and assist (8.7 per game). He is the first NCAA Division I player to lead the nation in scoring and assists in the same season since assists became an officially recorded statistic in 1983.
• Young’s 27.4 scoring average in the 2017-18 season is the highest ever recorded by an Oklahoma or Big 12 player.
• Young joined the late, great Wayman Tisdale on the only Oklahoma Sooner to earn Consensus All-American First-Team status as a freshman.
• He broke the Oklahoma freshman record for points (876), assists (279), made three-pointers (118) and made free throws (236).
• He is the first NCAA Division I player from a major conference to score more than 800 points and 250 assists in the same season.
• Young’s 279 assists this season was just one shy of the all-time OU basketball record set by Ricky Grace in 1988.
• He delivered 22 assists in a game against Northwestern State early in the 2017-18 season to tie an NCAA record. That all broke the Oklahoma and Big 12 records for assists in a single game (the previous record was 18).
• The 6-foot, 2-inch point guard from Norman scored 20 or more points in 25 of the 32 games he played in this season, including 18 of his first 19 games.
• Young scored a career-high 48 points (or 59 percent of OU’s total team output) on Jan. 20 in an 83-81 overtime loss to Oklahoma State.
• He exceeded 40 points in a game four time this past season and exceeded 30 points nine times.
• The Big 12 head coaches voted Young the Big 12 Freshman of the Year and unanimously selected him to the All-Big 12 First Team and the All-Newcomer Team.

When Young is selected in the NBA Draft in late June, he will become the third Oklahoma guard to be drafted in the last three seasons. Buddy Hield and Isaiah Cousins (who also wore No. 11 as a Sooner) were selected in the 2016 NBA Draft.

And finally, as a result of all of the national recognition and all of these individual accomplishments, we can expect to see Young’s No. 11 jersey number hanging from the rafters at some point down the road (no pun intended) where the Sooners play basketball.