Showing posts with label Missouri. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Missouri. Show all posts

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Hot streak for Kansas hits new peak in romp of Missouri

The downside to Kansas's 103-86 slicing of rival Missouri on Monday night is that some people might remember it all to well.

The Jayhawks were as close to perfect as a team can expect to be on the offensive end, and just about anything they do moving forward runs the risk of being compared to this performance.

It looks eye-popping on the surface alone, as the nation's second-ranked club shot 60.7 percent from the floor and was 11-of-19 from 3-point range. They compiled a shade under a 2:1 assist-to-turnover ratio, and were incredibly efficient in their execution, with only four of those 103 points coming via the fast break.

Quick, accurate and sharp ball movement in the half-court led to open shots from everywhere, and every one of them seemed to fall.

The only notable offensive blemish Kansas had on the night was an 18-of-28 showing at the free throw line.

Oh well. There's not much difference between scoring 103 and 108 points in only 40 minutes.

But it's a closer look at some of the individual efforts that shows just how well Bill Self's machine is running right now.

It goes far beyond the Morris twins, who combined to turn in a ho-hum 38-point, 15-rebound night.

• Junior point guard Tyshawn Taylor was not wild and out of control, which he has a tendency to be at the wrong times. He was the only KU player to have what you'd consider a poor shooting night (4-of-14), but had only two turnovers in 35 minutes, which Self will take any night from him.

• In his second game replacing the injured Josh Selby in the starting lineup, senior Brady Morningstar had eight points, seven assists and no turnovers in a game-high 38 minutes. This came after scoring a career-high 19 points on Saturday at Nebraska. The fact that Selby didn't play — but probably will again soon — was a mere afterthought.

• Also helping absorb the blow from the brief loss of Selby are senior swingman Mario Little and sophomore guard Travis Releford. Little scored a career-best 17 points against Mizzou, including a 3-of-3 night from beyond the arc. Releford is just rounding back into form after an ankle sprain, tallied 10 points on 4-of-5 shooting in 16 minutes.

Monday's shellacking was simply the peak of a wild run that Kansas has enjoyed since suffering its lone loss of the season to Texas on Jan. 22.

The Jayhawks aren't necessarily stifling opponents on the defensive end, which Self always prefers, but are instead overwhelming them with offense.

In the five games since the setback, KU is out-scoring opponents by an average margin of 16.8 points, hasn't shot worse than 50.9 percent and is a combined 47-of-97 from the outside.

They're also finishing opponents off much more emphatically after letting a handful big leads vanish in the second half several times earlier this season.

The chances of them keeping it at least near the recent mean look good, too, with five upcoming games against unranked opponents before finishing the regular season at home against No. 22 Texas A&M and on the road in the rematch with No. 19 Mizzou.

They've simply looked like a different team since the Texas loss, which came roughly 12 hours after sophomore forward Thomas Robinson's mother passed.

On the Friday night before that game, after the news was delivered to Robinson by his younger sister, the team was with him in his on-campus apartment into the wee hours of the morning. That next week, they traveled to the funeral in Washington, D.C., to be by his side.

During the current run, it's had the look like a closer team.

It's showing on paper, too.

Ryan Greene covers UNLV and the Mountain West Conference for the Las Vegas Sun. Read his Rebels coverage and follow him on Twitter.

Related: Kansas Jayhawks


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Monday, October 25, 2010

Oklahoma may have been doomed at Missouri, but not by its ranking

Missouri 36, Oklahoma 27. The headline-grabbing story out of Columbia, on the heels of the road flops by Alabama and Ohio State the last two weeks, is surely the ongoing "Curse of No.1": College football hasn't seen this kind of back-to-back-to-back attrition at the top of the polls in 50 years. At this rate, it's verging on a theme that could come define to the 2010 season: No. 1 team goes on the road against a good-not-great conference rival in search of "respect," No. 1 team quickly falls behind, No. 1 team eventually goes down convincingly by two scores. Pandemonium ensues. Lather, rinse, repeat. The Sooners' likely replacement atop the BCS, Oregon (already No. 1 in all the mainstream human polls), is clearly walking into a death trap next week at USC.

Unlike Alabama and Ohio State, though, and unlike Oregon next week, Oklahoma's demise hardly came out of the blue. Its Achilles heel has been evident from the beginning. Defense was the issue when the Sooner secondary was flambeed by Utah State on opening night, it remained an issue through the subsequent six weeks and it was finally the death knell tonight in their nascent BCS Championship campaign.

Oklahoma had already been popped for at least 24 points three times over its first seven games, in too-close-for-comfort wins over USU, Cincinnati and Air Force. Each of that seemingly overmatched trio rang up secret saving grace during the 7-0 start.

That's not meant to sound dismissive toward the Tigers, who suddenly find their own perfect start validated ahead of yet another "trap" game, a defining trip to Nebraska next week that should decide the Big 12 North in its final year of existence. Mizzou wasn't supposed to be back here so quickly after the core of the explosive 2007 team took its record-breaking act to the next level, if it ever made it back at all. With an almost entirely new cast, new quarterback and newly feisty defense, it finds itself back on the verge of the national championship cauldron with five very winnable games to go, off the program's biggest win in decades. The good vibrations may or may not endure past the upcoming trip to Lincoln, but the night was every bit as much of an arrival for the Tigers as an exit for Oklahoma.

The Sooners may get another shot at the proverbial redemption, if both teams advance to a December rematch of the 2007 and 2008 Big 12 Championship games. The BCS may still beckon them as the best team in the conference at the end. But they were an awkward fit at No. 1, even for a week, and their chances of getting back left the stadium just ahead of the goal posts.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.


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