Texas Tech basketball: Kevin McCullar’s five best games of 2019-20
No Texas Tech basketball player improved more this season than freshman Kevin McCullar Jr. so let’s look at his five best games from 2019-20.
Texas Tech basketball fans weren’t quite sure just what we should expect from Kevin McCullar when the 2019-20 season began. Now, after he made massive strides in his redshirt freshman season, most Red Raider fans believe that he’s a building block for the future.
Don’t forget that McCullar made the unusual decision to forego his senior year of high school basketball to enroll at Texas Tech early. Thus, he arrived on campus in January of 2019 with the full intention of redshirting, which he did.
Therefore, he was somewhat overlooked by fans because his arrival came in the middle of the best season in program history. But when you consider that he was the No. 19 player in Texas and the No. 43 small forward nationally in the class of 2019 according to 247Sports, it becomes clear that his pedigree far exceeded the hype with which he arrived.
What’s more, unbeknown to most of the fanbase was the fact that two injuries had hampered his ability to work on his game and develop in the weight room. That’s why, when the season began, McCullar didn’t look like a player that was destined for the starting five by the time February would roll around.
After all, in the first 14 games of the season, the San Antonio native averaged just 3.8 points per game and saw the floor just 12.8 minutes per contest. In that span, he had just two double-digit scoring games while being held without a point four times.
But in the final 15 games he played, his productivity doubled as he became an integral member of the rotation and eventually a starter. He closed out the season averaging 8 points per game with six double-digit scoring games and no games in which he didn’t score. What’s more, his minutes per game rose to 23.8.
By the time the season ended, McCullar was Tech’s best on-ball defender as well as one of the program’s most reliable rebounders. The long-armed 6-foot-6 wing concluded the year with averages of 6 points, 3.2 rebounds, and 1.2 steals per game but those totals don’t accurately portray the player that he was when the season was cut short.
In the final six games of 2019-20, the six games he started, McCullar averaged 10 points, 5.8 rebounds, and 29.8 minutes per game. Had those numbers been what he had put up for an entire season, he would be garnering much more attention for his freshman season than he is.
Still, Red Raider fans know just how good McCullar was by the end of the season. In fact, it’s tough to remember a player in the recent history of this program improving as much as he did from the start of January to the end of the regular season schedule. So let’s take a look at the five best games from his season to help us appreciate the foundational piece of the program’s future that he has quickly become.