Texas Tech basketball: How the Red Raiders beat the Sooners
The Texas Tech basketball team finally pulled out a close game on Tuesday night so let’s look inside the box score to see where the Red Raiders beat the Sooners.
No one would have blamed Texas Tech basketball fans for being a bit nervous as Tuesday’s game against Oklahoma unfolded. After all, this year’s team has not embued us with a ton of confidence in its ability to come up big in tight games.
That’s what we had on our hands again inside United Supermarkets Arena as Texas Tech and OU traded the lead 17 times. In fact, neither team ever had more than an 8-point lead and that came only in the closing moments when Tech pulled away thanks to some late free throws.
"“It was just a great win for us,” Chris Beard said. “To finish the first half of Big 12 play against a team that I think is an NCAA tournament team with a Hall of Fame coach is great. Oklahoma is really difficult to play and coach against. I thought our guys stood the test. There are going to be a lot of ups and downs during the course of the game and I thought for the most part we kept our composure and kept fighting.”"
With just 1:32 to play, OU’s Austin Reaves hit a 3-pointer to pull his team to within three points at 64-61. At that point, Tech fans likely started having flashbacks to other games this year when their team spit the bit in the closing minutes of one or two-possession games.
Of course, there was the pair of losses in Las Vegas when Tech went into the final two minutes trailing Iowa by just two points and Creighton by four. Tech saw the Hawkeyes end the game on an 11-2 run and then fell to the Blue Jays in OT after closing the gap to end regulation.
Tech also lost their next game in OT as well. But in the road contest against DePaul, the Red Raiders should have never allowed an extra five minutes as Davide Moretti missed a key free throw that could have put his team up four points with less than 20 seconds to play.
In the season’s first conference loss, Baylor closed out the game with a 5-2 edge in the final 30 seconds after Chris Clarke’s 3-point play drew the Red Raiders to within 52-50. Falling to Kentucky in a similar way, Tech had opportunities to win that game in the closing seconds of both regulation and OT but couldn’t come up with the critical plays.
Then there was Saturday’s three-point loss at Kansas. Down 78-75 with fifteen seconds to play, Tech failed to get a three-point shot away as Jahmi’us Ramsey was twice denied as he tried to drive to the rim.
"“Coach talked about finishing all this week, so you know we tried to do our best finishing the game, getting to the foul line, knocking down free throws, and finishing,” Kyler Edwards said. “I just tried to make the right play every time and come up with the ball screens, reading defense, and I just tried to fill in the spots and make open shots.”"
Hopefully, Edwards and his teammates showed on Tuesday that they are starting to figure out what it takes to close out tight games because as we move through February and into March, the pressure and intensity is only going to ratchet up on a nightly basis. So let’s go inside the box score to see just how the Red Raiders managed to claim this important Big 12 win. We will start with an area where Tech has not had an edge in recent games.