You know the story already: the Sooners dominated the opening minutes and held leads as large as 21 points in the opening period. The Cats scraped back to within single digits multiple times, but Oklahoma was able to keep them at arm's length for the remainder and finished with a comfortable 86-76 victory.
Visual Box Scores for the game are below. I've made one minor tweak worth noting: below each plot you'll find buttons allowing you quickly select/deselect specific groups of players. If the plots don't load correctly, try the links here and here.
Some things I saw:
- Buddy Hield didn't actually make every shot he took, just most of them. This might seem like a dumb point to you, but watching the game, it sure didn't seem that way to me. It's hard to win games when the opposing team's All-American is on fire.
- Lots of missed shots at the rim. By my count, K-State missed 23(!) of its 39 shots of the dunk, layup, or tip-in variety. The OU front court was protecting the rim big time, coming away with 11 blocked shots.
- Thank goodness for Dean Wade and Barry Brown. The shot chart looks especially ugly if you take those two out of the equation. Wade in particular was much more assertive in the second half than I can recall from the rest of the season. I hope that continues.
For a full analysis of yesterday's happenings, go read Eric's game recap.