Texas Tech basketball: Red Raiders thrive on shutting down opposing stars

R.J. Barrett – Duke

Despite all the hype given to Duke’s freshman forward Zion Williamson, he is not the leading scorer on his own team.  That honor belongs to fellow freshman R.J. Barrett who is scoring 22.8 points per game.

Projected by virtually everyone as a top-10 NBA pick this year, the 6-foot-7 forward has had 25 20-point games this year with six of those being 30-point games.  But when he faced the Texas Tech defense at Madison Square Garden in December, he had one of his worst nights of the year.

Though the native of Ontario, Canada managed 16 points, it took him 22 shot attempts to get to there.  Making just seven shots from the field that night, Barrett shot a mere 31.8% from the floor, his third-worst shooting performance of the season.

Tech was successful in turning Barrett into a jump shooter.  He was 0-7 from 3-point range but as he shot failed him, he was not willing to be aggressive with the ball as he only attempted three free throws.  While Tech did a respectable job on Zion Williamson (holding him to 17 points on 4-9 shooting before he fouled out), it was their ability to make Barrett inefficient that helped them keep the country’s second-most prolific offense in check.

Sometimes, shutting down an opponent does not mean shutting him out but, as was the case with Barrett, it means making him so inefficient that he may shut out some of his teammates.   The Red Raiders lured Barrett into doing what he is not particularly adept at, shooting the 3, and as a result, he became a liability to his team for one of the few times this season.