Texas Tech basketball: Critical moments in Tuesday’s victory at KSU
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Tech opened the game on a 10-0 run
When playing on the road, especially in a building where you had won only once since doing so in 2007 (as was the case with the Red Raiders and Bramlage Coliseum), jumping out to an early lead is important. Doing so will take the crowd out of the game and put a team, especially one as troubled and wounded as K-State, in an early defeatist mindset.
Though the crowd at Tuesday’s game was far from capacity, it was important that the Red Raiders were able to storm out to a 10-0 lead in the first four minutes of the game. And as we look at who scored those first ten points, it becomes even more clear how critical that run was.
Every one of those points came from two Red Raiders who had been a bit off at times in recent games, Kyler Edwards and Davide Moretti. By getting those two sharpshooters going early, it gave the Red Raiders the type of confidence that they would need in order to secure their first true road win of the year.
Edwards hit his first 3-pointer of the game and then was fouled when attempting another. After he hit all three of those free throws, he had already come to within three points of what he scored Saturday at West Virginia. Given that he had been just 2-16 from deep in Big 12 play, one can imagine how good it must have felt for him to see his first long-range attempt go through the net.
Meanwhile, Davide Moretti, who got all four of his points in this span on a 4-point play, had his second-straight hot-shooting game. After being his team’s only offensive weapon in Morgantown, he followed up that 16-point effort with 14 points on an efficient 3-6 shooting, all from 3-point range. It’s been encouraging to see him follow up hist 3-11 shooting, 8-point night against Baylor with two strong games.
By putting the underdogs in a huge early hole, the Red Raiders did exactly what they wanted to do before the first media timeout. And the fact that their two top returning scorers finally had strong games on the same night made that portion of the game even more important.
Those two shooters have to be consistently productive at the same time for the Red Raiders to have any hope of reaching their goals. Thus, it was rather uplifting to see both Edwards and Moretti finally have the type of offensive games that we knew they were capable of. That’s a great sign as we move forward.