Sooners Fall 72-61 To Jayhawks On Second Half Meltdown
by OnlyOneOU on Jan 7, 2012 5:49 PM CST
in Basketball
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PrintOklahoma got off to a solid start hanging with the more talented Kansas Jayhawks blow for blow throughout the first half. KU could not get a shot to fall and had Travis Releford to thank for single handedly keeping them in the game as he tied his career high 16 points by the first half. Before the half, neither team had lead by more that five points and there were eight lead changes. However, that is about as good as it got for the Sooners as they took a 34-33 lead into the half, something no one saw coming.
From there the Sooners would miss eight of their first ten shots of the second half while committing five turnovers. Both teams battled hard in the first half, yet OU lacked in that area giving way for the lights to come on for KU. Oklahoma gave up layup after layup and for the second game in a row gave up a large run to start the second half.
This game was all decided in the second half as Lon Kruger's squad shot 30% to Bill Self squad's 60%. Those are tough odds to overcome. Steven Pledger led Oklahoma with 14 points followed by Andrew Fitzgerald who had 11 points yet both combined for a sluggish 9-28 from the field. This time the Sooners got some bench scoring as Carl Blair put up 11 in very limited minutes. It was just too little too late as OU never recovered from the run to start the second.
The Sooners did excel on the boards once again winning the rebounding margin over the larger Jayhawks by +2 and collecting 14 second chance opportunities. Sam Grooms continues to make great decisions turning the ball over once while dishing out five assits.
A few things to take away from this game: Oklahoma continues to work hard and has greatly increased their free throw attempts and percentage. This afternoon the Sooners found themselves at the line 28 times while knocking down 20 of those for a team 71.4% from the charity stripe. It would appear that Oklahoma has found it's aggressiveness again. Lastly, it is still all about consistency. Pledger started off hot but then significantly dropped off or there is like a much closer game coming down the stretch. Fitz wasn't able to knock anything down either and you still never know what you are going to get from the bench.
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Hoping
I guess I had been lulled into thinking that maybe this team was further along than they are. I did not expect to see them win either of these games, but I had hoped that they would have been more competitive against Missouri and at least pressed KU so we were within single digits at the end of that game.
Still, it is a vast improvement on where I expected them to be. It will be interesting to see how they play against teams that are in the mid-tier of the conference as I think that is still doable. The game against OSU will be interesting to see how they respond to these past two tough games and just overall level of competitiveness.
Still very happy with the progress that this team has made under Kruger in such a short time – does he have a reputation as a strong recruiter or is there someone on staff that we are looking to to secure commitments?
What's frustrating for me
Is I think several of this team’s “issues” are easily fixable. Yet they continue to make the same mistakes.
As for recruiting, I don’t think he has a reputation as being a dynamic recruiter but much like as a coach he’s pretty solid. Basketball recruiting doesn’t get nearly the coverage that football does, but from what I’ve read he has OU in on several highly regarded recruits. He’s also made a noticeable effort to recruit the state of OK which Capel obviously never did. And I think that is a good thing. Just like in football, IMO it’s never a bad thing to get kids who grew up dreaming of playing for OU.
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