Oklahoma basketball: Sooner shooting woes lead to Red River loss
By Chip Rouse
In one of the season’s ugliest and strangest games, the Oklahoma basketball team missed two key free throws with under 10 seconds remaining that cost them the game.
With six seconds remaining on the game clock and the Sooners leading by two points, Kristian Doolittle, OU’s lone senior on Senior Night at the Lloyd Noble Center, was fouled by Texas and went to the foul line with the chance to close out the win for Oklahoma.
Because Texas was over the 10-foul limit, Doolittle was awarded two free throws, but the 80-percent foul shooter missed both charity shots, which provided the Longhorns with the opening they needed, and they cashed it in on a banked three-pointer by Matt Coleman with just 0.4 seconds left on the clock.
The Sooners struggled offensively all night, but they managed to take their first lead since the opening minutes of the game at the 3:45 mark in the second half when a free throw by Brady Manek put OU up 44-43.
The game see-sawed back and forth over the final four minutes with five lead changes.
Coleman’s game-winning three-ball was his third made three-pointer of the night and gave him a gam-high 21 points. It also proved to be redemption from this same game a year ago, when Coleman’s last-second shot was blocked by Jamal Bieniemy, preserving a 69-67 win for the Sooners.
Doolittle again led Oklahoma in scoring with 20 points in his last home game for the Sooners. He also gathered in 10 rebounds. Austin Reaves has 13 points and Brady Manek added 10. It was only the third time in 13 games this season that OU lost with those three scoring in double figures.
Oklahoma shot an atrocious 28.0 percent in the game and was just two of 20 on three-point shots. Texas didn’t shoot that much better — only 33.9 percent for the game — but they made seven more field goals than the Sooners and six more than OU from behind the three-point line.
The Sooners shot 27 more free throws than Texas, which went to the free-throw line just one time in the entire game and was two for two. Oklahoma made 21 of 29 from the charity stripe. Ironically, that’s where the game was lost, as the Sooners missed three of four foul shots in the last 16 seconds.
Oklahoma falls to 18-12 for the season and 8-9 in the Big 12 with one game remaining in the regular season, at TCU on Saturday. The victory by Texas, their fifth straight conference win, may be enough to get them off the bubble and into this year’s NCAA Tournament.