Oklahoma basketball: Four story lines for 2019-20 Sooner men’s squad
By Chip Rouse
While the attention of Sooner fans was heavily focused on where football team would come out in the initial College Football Playoff rankings for 2019, the men’s Oklahoma basketball team was busy Tuesday night opening a new season with a solid 85-67 win over the Roadrunners of University of Texas-San Antonio.
The two teams battled back and forth to a 36-36 deadlock at halftime, but after falling behind 38-36 in the opening minute of the second half, Oklahoma went on a 25-5 run to take total command of the game. It was Lon Kruger’s ninth straight opening-game win as the Sooners’ head coach.
It was a good opening-game win over an underrated team, coached by former Oklahoma assistant Steve Henson, that some think will contend this season for an NCAA Tournament berth.
With the college basketball season now up and running, here are four Oklahoma story lines to follow in the 2019-20 season:
How will all young players on the Sooners’ roster impact the team this season?
Oklahoma has eight freshman and sophomores on its active roster, including a recruiting class that ranked in the top 20, according to both ESPN and Rivals. A year ago, the Sooners had one of the oldest teams in the country, with eight seniors. Now that has flip-flopped, and Oklahoma is one of the youngest teams in the country, which prompts the question: How will all the young players blend in with the three returning starters, and how much will they be expected to contribute this season?
We got a glimpse of how that might work out in the season home opener with UTSA. Freshman guard De’Vion Harmon, the highest rated player in the Sooners’ 2019 class, scored 23 points in 33 minutes of action, including three of six from behind the three-point arc.
Fellow freshman Victor Iwuakor and junior-college transfer Alondes Williams also saw quite a bit of action off the bench and contributed seven and eight points, respectively. In all, 11 Sooners saw playing time against UTSA, and six of the 11 were freshman and eight were not on the team a year ago.
Could this be Lon Kruger’s final season of coaching at Oklahoma?
This is Lon Kruger’s 34th season as a college head coach, and that doesn’t include the two seasons he served as the head coach of the Atlanta Hawks in the NBA. Kruger is starting his ninth season at OU, which is the longest he has been at any one school.
He is one of just two coaches to take five different teams, including Oklahoma in six of the last seven seasons, to the NCAA Tournament.
Kruger has not indicated he is considering retirement, but at 67 years of age and a lengthy and distinguished career in and around the game of basketball, it is not unreasonable to assume that he may not want to coach that much longer.
How will the Sooners replace the 59 percent of their scoring they lost with the departure of eight seniors from last year’s team?
Oklahoma not only loses more than half of its offensive production from last season, but also the leadership provided by a roster that contained eight seniors, including a pair of graduate transfers.
Senior forward Kristian Doolittle and junior forward Brady Manek are expected to carry a big part of the scoring lead as well as on- and off-court leadership. Manek scored 23 points in the season opener. Doolittle will not see his first action of the season, however, until Saturday because of sitting out the first game with a suspension. Sophomore Jamal Bieniemy is expected to make more of a contribution this season. Bieniemy averaged 4.9 points in 25.3 minutes his freshman season.
The Sooners should also get a scoring boost from Wichita State transfer Austin Reeves. A deadeye three-point shooter for the Shockers his sophomore season, Reeves tied for the team high on Tuesday with 23 points.
Can Oklahoma make the NCAA Tournament this season?
The Big 12 Preseason Coaches Poll picked the Sooners to finish eighth in the conference this season, and most preseason preview publications projected that Oklahoma would miss the NCAA Tournament for just the second time in the last seven seasons. ESPN college basketball analyst Jay Bilas didn’t rank OU within his top 68 Division I teams heading into 2019-20 season.
Joe Lunardi’s preseason “Bracketology” projections has the Big 12 sending five teams to the 2020 NCAA Tourney after placing six teams in the tournament last season, including the Sooners. OU is not one of the five Big 12 teams Lunardi projects making the field this season.
The Sooners have surprised before under Kruger, even reaching the Final Four in 2016, but with all the new faces and with the Big 12 being one of the strongest basketball leagues among the major conferences, Oklahoma’s journey to the tourney will be long and extremely challenging. If the Sooners are able to make the 68-team NCAA Tournament field, it will probably be as a double-digit seed.