Texas Tech basketball: 3 Red Raiders that aren’t being talked about enough
Kevin McCullar finished last year as the Texas Tech basketball team’s best player
We tend to take sophomore Kevin McCullar Jr. for granted and I’m not sure why. After all, Chris Beard has said multiple times that the San Antonio product was his team’s best player in the last month of the 2019-20 season. Thus, you would think that the hype surrounding the 6-foot-6 guard would be substantial as his second season approaches.
McCullar is one of those players who could be in line for the type of meteoric rise that second-year players often make but for some reason, he’s not getting nearly as much love as is fellow sophomore Terrence Shannon Jr., who is on the preseason Julius Erving Award Watchlist. (That award is annually given to the nation’s best small forward.)
You won’t find McCullar on any preseason award watchlist but we could very well find him on postseason lists. That’s because he’s finally had a healthy offseason and that could unlock his full potential.
"“I wasn’t able to hit the weight room as hard as I am now,” McCullar recently said when talking about his last two injury-plagued offseasons. “You know, and be out there every day practicing. I missed some days going to the training room. But now, I’m doing good and being able to knock it out.”"
An injury in high school cut short McCullar’s senior year and prompted him to enroll early at Texas Tech where he redshirted. Then, more injuries woes limited his ability to fully participate in Tech’s offseason program prior to last season.
Thus, McCullar got off to somewhat of a slow start in 2019-20. In the schedule’s first 21 games, he had just three double-digit scoring outputs.
But as the year progressed, he emerged as Tech’s best on-ball defender while coming into his own on the offensive end of the court. In the final eight games of the season, he had five double-digit scoring efforts and he was the team’s leading scorer at both Oklahoma and Oklahoma State.
As he emerged, he supplanted Shannon in the starting lineup, and for good reason. While Shannon proved to be electric at times, he was also wildly inconsistent from possession to possession.
That’s not the case with McCullar. He has a tremendous feel for the game on both ends of the floor and he always seems to be in the right position to make plays. He also does a little bit of everything on the court including rebounding as he averaged 3.2 per game.
McCullar is this team’s glue guy. While that term has for some reason become cast in a bit of a less than flattering light, the reality is that every team needs a player who has an all-around game that makes up for some deficiencies from other players.
When I look at McCullar, I see a player who has the potential to be to Texas Tech what Draymond Green is to the Golden State Warriors, a guy who can do it all on the court and who is invaluable to his team’s success. But because what McCullar does on a possession-by-possession basis isn’t jaw-dropping, he doesn’t get talked about like McClung or Shannon. But when we talk about winning, McCullar should be one of the first players we discuss.