Oklahoma basketball: Five things to know from 2017-18 Season

Take defense more seriously

Unless you are going to plan to simply outscore every team you play, you better be able to get some stops on the defensive end.

With an offense that most of the season was ranked in the top five in the country in terms of points scored per game, the approach it seemed Oklahoma took early in the season, and continued to believe in even when the competition became much tougher in the Big 12, was that defense didn’t matter that much because the offense, with All-American Trae Young running the show, was good enough to beat anybody.

Well, we know how that turned out. Poor team defense, and in too many games this past season the complete absence thereof, was, in my view, the prime reason Oklahoma ended up losing 11 of its final 15 games.

The Sooners ranked fifth among NCAA Division I teams in scoring offense this season (84.9 points per game), but were 337th in the country in scoring defense, allowing their opponents to score an average of 81.7 points per game.

Moreover, OU’s opponents shot 44.3 percent from the field, which ranked 200th in the nation. That is not going to win many games in a conference as good as the Big 12. If it weren’t for an offense that was capable of putting up plenty of points, Oklahoma probably wouldn’t have won as many as eight games in the conference.

Oklahoma has never been a particularly strong defensive team under Lon Kruger, but if they don’t get better in this aspect of the game — and we talking about getting much better — things are likely to get even worse before they get better.