Oklahoma basketball: Three-pointers from a Sooners’ schooling by Xavier

There were few positives from the Oklahoma basketball game against Baylor, but plenty to be learned from it.

Xavier improved its season record to 7-0 with a decisive 99-77 victory over the visiting Sooners at the nearly empty Cintas Center in the Queen City of Cincinnati. There were approximately 300 fans on hand, but the arena would normally be packed to its 10,000-seat capacity.

So home-court advantage can’t be blamed for the Oklahoma demise in this one.

This game proved to be a huge learning experience for a team for a Sooner team that has played three games in less than a week, with two of them being away from home.

Here are three pointers we can takeaway from Oklahoma’s first loss of the 2020-21 season:

It was a defensive breakdown, not an absence of offense, that lost this one

Oklahoma shot 48 percent from the field, which is good enough to win most games, but not when you allow the opponent to shoot 57 percent and, worse, a red-hot 60 percent from behind the three-point line.

The Musketeers made 19 of 32 three-point attempts, with senior Nate Johnson and sophomore Zach Freemantle accounting for 11 of them.

When the opponent is making one out of every two shot attempts, you’re not able to get defensive stops and transition opportunities to create offense out of your defense.

“That reinforces our need to do all that,” Kruger said in his postgame comments. “We didn’t do much defensively to keep them out of their rhythm, out of their routine, and we have a lot of work to do.”

The Sooners didn’t rebound particularly well, either. Too many times they were held to one shot per possession, when they could have been using size and more physicality to create second-chance opportunities.

Three Xavier starters reached the 20-point level, with Freemantle scoring a game-high 28 points on 12 of 14 shooting.

“They (Xavier) were hot,” Kruger said. “They shot the ball better, but when you aren’t doing much to disrupt them, their confidence grows.”

Sooners need to play more games

This was Xavier’s seventh game of the season, and it showed. The Sooners had to delay the start of their season because of COVID issues within the program. Their season opener was postponed until last Thursday, and they’ve played three times since then, winning two.

OU played well in its first two games, going over the century mark and winning by 39 points in its season-opening victory. The Sooners also registered a conference win, coming from behind to get a road win over TCU. Those two quick wins might have allowed a false sense of security to set in to the Sooners’ psyche. It that was the case, however, Wednesday night’s 22-point loss certainly delivered a huge slice of humble pie.

Complementary offense was a great sign going forward

Seniors Brady Manek and Austin Reeves are clearly the main cogs in the Oklahoma offense. The pair is averaging 20.0 and 17.7 points, respectively, per game. It is not in the Sooners’ best interest to rely on their two big guns to shoulder all the load in every game and become the difference in winning or losing. As good as Manek and Reeves are on on offensive end, they are not superstars, and even if they were, the supporting cast must also be able to provide complementary offense.

It was good to see in the Xavier game that three other Sooners besides Manek and Reeves scored in double figures. De’Vion Harmon, who was making his first start of the season, contributed 13 points, Alondes Williams added 10 and sophomore Victor Iwuakor, playing in his first game of the season, came off the bench and scored 10 points in nine minutes of action.

Oklahoma will play at home at Lloyd Noble Center for the remainder of December. Over the next week, the Sooners will host Florida A&M, Oral Roberts and Houston Baptist. Texas Tech comes to Norman on Dec. 22 as Big 12 season gets down to real business.