Oklahoma basketball: Go figure…another faulty Sooner effort
By Chip Rouse
In a game the men’s Oklahoma basketball team desperately needed with a rugged February schedule ahead, the Sooners couldn’t get it done, and against a team that was ripe for the picking.
For a second straight game in the same week, Oklahoma was outhustled and outplayed, this time resulting in a 78-71 loss against a literally patchwork West Virginia team. It was a cold and snowy Saturday afternoon in Morgantown, West Virginia, and for most of the game, the Sooners played as if they were frostbitten.
Had OU not made 18 of 19 free throws in the second half, this game might have been much closer to the 30-point blowout the Sooners suffered at home to Baylor earlier in the week. During one six-minute stretch in the second half, 10 consecutive OU points came from the free-throw line.
West Virginia, which has been struggling all season, played Saturday without two of its best players: Six-foot, 8-inch Sagaba Konate has played in just eight games because of a knee injury, and junior starting guard James Bolden, who has averaged 12.2 points this season, was out for the second straight game with an ankle injury.
That didn’t seem to matter on Saturday, as other Mountaineers stepped up, and West Virginia dominated the Sooners in the paint and in second-chance opportunities.
Lon Kruger has had several highly successful seasons at Oklahoma, but the month of February has never been kind to the Sooners in Kruger’s eight seasons in Norman. Only once in the seven previous seasons have the Sooners’ had better than a .500 record in the month of February.
Losing on Ground Hog Day only feeds the worst fears of Oklahoma fans that this year’s team is showing worrisome signs of the slippery slope that befell Trae Young and the Sooners a year ago. OU raced out to a terrific 14-2 start last season and, at one point, was ranked as high as No. 4 in the nation.
Sooner fans painfully know what happened from there, and they definitely don’t want to endure a repeat. Unfortunately, OU’s lackluster performance in its last two outings doesn’t produce a positive feeling about what lies ahead.
The story of Saturday’s West Virginia game can be summed up in the glaring disparity in two statistical categories: Points scored in the paint and offensive rebounding. West Virginia had a sizeable advantage in both, and that cost Oklahoma, now 15-7 overall, the game and led to the Sooners’ sixth conference loss to go with just three wins.
Here are some more notable numbers that tell the story of this game:
1-4 — Oklahoma’s road record in Big 12 games this season.
5 — At one point in the first half, Oklahoma missed five consecutive free throws. The Sooners were just 3 of 10 from the charity stripe in the first 20 minutes against west Virginia.
9:50 — Time in the game Oklahoma held the lead.
10 — Oklahoma’s leading scorer on the season, Christian James, scored 10 points, but eight of those came from free throws. James was just 1 of 9 shooting for the game and is just 3 of 19 from the field in his last two games.
18 — Brady Manek led Oklahoma with 18 points, including seven of 10 field goals and four of six three-balls.
21-35 — Oklahoma’s record in the month of February under Lon Kruger (5-24 away from home).
25 — Brandon Knapper came off the bench to score a career-high 25 points for West Virginia.
26 — Points scored by Oklahoma in the first half against West Virginia, marking the third consecutive half in which the Sooners failed to reach the 30-point level. The Sooners scored 21 and 26 points, respectively, in the two halves against Baylor earlier in the week). OU is 14-2 when it scores 30 or more points in the first half.
27-9 — West Virginia had a 27-9 advantage over the Sooners in second-chance points.
46-30 — Oklahoma is the best rebounding team in the Big 12, but that was not the case on Saturday as West Virginia outrebounded the Sooners by a 16-point margin, including 18-7 on the offensive glass.