Texas Tech basketball: Tariq Owens can provide offensive boost

As the Texas Tech basketball team prepares for the second month of Big 12 play, forward Tariq Owens has seen his offensive production begin to pick up, which could be huge for the Red Raiders.

Monday night against TCU, the Texas Tech offense looked as explosive as it has all season in its 84-65 win. One of the key reasons was the scoring of senior forward Tariq Owens who registered seventeen points.

It was the second time in three games in which Owens was a double-digit scorer after he put up 12 in Tech’s loss at Kansas State last week. In between, he was limited to just two points against Arkansas mainly because he played only 21 minutes spending most of the game in foul trouble before fouling out late in the second half.

Where Owens has become surprisingly useful has been with his 3-point shot. For the season, he is shooting just 28.6% which is down from the 32.4% he shot from deep last year for St. John’s.

He has never hit more than 12 3’s in a season and entering the Kansas State game, he’d hit just two this year. But against both the Wildcats and the Horned Frogs, he hit a pair of threes doubling his career number of games with more than one 3-pointer.

This isn’t to suggest that he is going to be the second coming of Steph Curry. In fact, it would still be wise for him to remain extremely judicious with his shots from behind the arc (after all, one of this 3’s against TCU was banked in) but he can be a player that opposing defenses must respect from outside which will only help to open the lane for Jarrett Culver to operate or Davide Moretti and Matt Money to finish.

One thing is for certain, Tech would love to see Owens’ offensive production continue on its current trend. Averaging 8.4 p.p.g. this year, he has seven double-digit games but is yet to do so in back-to-back outings.

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But last year, he had three such instances of sustained offensive success. And in a three-game stretch in late January of 2018, he averaged 14.6 per game against Georgetown, Creighton and Butler.

This year, he has had some impressive offensive showings against quality teams as well. He had a season-high 18 against USC in Kansas City helping Tech erase a double-digit halftime deficit.

In that game, he was 7-10 from the field including 1-2 from 3-point range. Against Memphis, he gave Tech 13 points to go along with a school-record eight blocks as Tech once again was able to climb out of a huge halftime hole.

His 12-point outing against Texas may have been overshadowed by Matt Mooney’s 22-point outburst but Owens’s contribution was huge in Tech’s six-point win. And what made his 12-point game against Kansas State unique is that he came of the bench for the first time this season in that game after a lackluster performance in the previous game against Baylor.

One of the keys for Owens seems to be his aggressiveness which is reflected by the number of trips he makes to the free throw line. In three of his double-digit games he went to the line at least three times.

Not a player that creates shots for himself, Owens is dependent on the effectiveness of Texas Tech’s motion offense to get quality looks. And against TCU, Tech’s ball-movement was as crisp as it has been all season helping the 6-foot-11 forward get looks in space.

What Owens can control is how hard he works to get open in the flow of the offense. The motion offense does not utilize set plays but revolves around principals of random movement. In other words, what a player is able to accomplish in that scheme depends almost entirely on his willingness to screen for others, cut to the rim and flash to the ball.

This is a far cry from the offensive system Owens ran in the last two years at St. John’s under former NBA star Chris Mullins. Therefore, Owens has to make certain that his activity on the offensive end mirrors that of his activity on the defensive end (which is a reversal of what we normally have to say about basketball players).

Big men often grow up playing a style of basketball that requires them to just sit on the low blocks waiting for a post-up opportunity. If Owens will continue to be an active part of the offense, he will find ways to score other than just finishing on alley-oops, which teams in the Big 12 have been ready to defend more effectively than teams in the non-conference portion of the schedule.

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Chris Beard needs Tech to have at least three players in double-digits every game. And we saw Monday what Tech looks like when four Red Raiders can hit that mark. If Tariq Owens can be a consistent producer on the scoreboard, the Texas Tech basketball team may just take its game to another level as the Big 12 race heats up.

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