Oklahoma basketball: New-look Sooners tip-off 2019-20 season
By Chip Rouse
With a roster that includes nine new players, the new-look men’s Oklahoma basketball team opens the 2019-20 season at home on Tuesday with a game against a good University of Texas-San Antonio team.
The Roadrunners of UTSA will pose a stronger opening-game challenge for the Sooners than many expect. To begin with, they possess one of the best guard combinations in the country in juniors Jhivvan Jackson and Keaton Wallace. Between them, the two All-Conference USA guards averaged more than 40 points a game last season for a Roadrunner team that finished fourth in the conference with an 11-7 record and 17-15 overall.
UTSA likes to play an up-tempo game and is capable of scoring 80 or more points in any given game. The young Sooners will receive a stern test on the defensive end and will have to shoot well and use their size advantage to avoid an opening night upset.
Oklahoma Sooners Basketball
Oklahoma used a 39-15 second-half run to defeat UTSA 87-67 last season in a road contest.
Only three players who played any substantial minutes for the Sooners last season return for 2019-20 — junior forward Brady Manek, senior forward Kristian Doolittle and sophomore guard Jamal Bieniemy.
Manek led the team in scoring a year ago with a 12.2 average. Only four OU players in the last 27 seasons have scored more total points as a freshman and sophomore than Manek’s 741 (Blake Griffin (1,728), Trae Young (876, in one season), Willie Warren (868) and Buddy Hield (756).
Oklahoma goes from the oldest team in the Big 12 to perhaps the youngest in the conference. The Sooners’ 15-man roster includes seven freshmen, three sophomores and just one senior.
The Sooners are young, but that youth includes a talented, top-20 recruiting class. De’Vion Harmon, a 6-foot, 1-inch guard from Denton, Texas, is the highest rated of the class. He scored 22 points in OU’s 89-76 exhibition victory a week ago over Southeastern Oklahoma State.
Jalen Hill, a 6-foot, 7-inch forward from Las Vegas, was the 2019 Gatorade Nevada Boys Basketball Player of the Year and was runner-up the year before that.
Also new this season and expected to see quite a bit of playing time for the Sooners is junior shooting guard Austin Reeves, who shot 45 percent from three-point range as a sophomore at Wichita State.
In addition to all the new faces on the roster, head coach Lon Kruger has added two new assistants this season: Jim Molinari, who was an assistant at Nebraska the last five seasons and has over 20 years of experience as a head coach at the Division I level, and Pooh Williamson, who comes to Norman after one year at the University of Miami (Florida). Before that he spent time at Texas Tech and Memphis.
Unlike most major conference schools that play most of their early season games on the friendly confines of the home court, Oklahoma will be tested right out of the gate, playing seven of its first 10 games away from Lloyd Noble Center.
The Sooners will play 21 games this season against teams that have made NCAA Tournament appearances in the last two years, including nonconference games with Minnesota, Stanford, Wichita State, Creighton Mississippi State and Butler or Missouri.
OU heads out on the road after the Tuesday night game with UTSA. The Sooners will play Minnesota on Saturday at a neutral site in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and then head to the Pacific Northwest to go against Oregon State as part of the Phil Knight Invitational. Those two teams had a combined record of 40-27 last season.