Five Questions – Texas Basketball Feb. 9 Update

As the Texas men’s and women’s basketball teams hosted nationally ranked opponents on Feb. 9 – the men lost 72-59 to No. 22 Oklahoma State hours before top-ranked Baylor trounced the women 75-49 by  – there were still plenty of questions to be answered as the squad try desperately to right the ship and make a final run toward the NCAA playoffs.

A postseason appearance for either team seems like a pipe dream, especially with the Texas men losing for the third time in four games and the Longhorn women having won just twice since the calendar turned to 2013.

“There is a lot of basketball left to play and we haven’t had our whole team together at all this year,” Texas men’s coach Rick Barnes said.

The evening game brought the defending national champions and Brittney Griner into the Erwin Center and showed Longhorn fans how high the bar has been raised and how much more work Texas coach Karen Aston has in front of her before UT can again be considered a formidable team.

[s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]

1. Will the Texas men’s team really be a changed team when Kabongo returns?

Barnes seems to think so. According to the coach, Texas plays tons better in practice than it does in its games, and aspect that can – at least somewhat – be attributed to Kabongo’s work in the Cooley Center (practice facility).

“There will be a different team in the floor Wednesday night – I guarantee that,” Barnes said. “Getting Myck into the lineup won’t disrupt any of our rhythm because we don’t have any rhythm that can be disrupted. We need to run and it’s obvious. That’s not just the point guard, it’s the whole team, but Myck will get us down the court in a hurry.”

Sitting out the first two-thirds-plus of the season has been tough on Kabongo, but in order for him to be successful, he will have to play smart on defense and make sure he doesn’t try to recapture all the play he lost in just the handful of games in which he will participate.

“Myck has been our hardest worker all year – he has never wavered from that,” Barnes said. “He is ready to go. We know he will make some mistakes, but defensively he will have to work and make sure he doesn’t get into foul trouble.”

2. How can the Texas men win without Sheldon McClellan, their leading scorer, scoring?

Given the fact that the Horns are 10-13 overall and 2-8 in Big 12 play – and just lost to Oklahoma State at home for the first time since 2004 – they can’t.

Against Oklahoma State, McClellan started but scored just two field goals, the first at the 9:14 mark of the second half. McClellan was expected to be the go-to guy this season (and he has been good in spurts), but Texas coach Rick Barnes doesn’t know if he can count on him from game to game, and can’t decide if McClellan is better starting or coming off the bench.

“We have to have Sheldon score the ball; we are not asking him to guard the opposition’s best player,” Barnes said after the loss to Oklahoma State. “He has to want to run the lanes, to cut and keep cutting and to work – he has to be ready every single night. Even if he doesn’t get the ball, his effort will make the defender work and that will lead to a payoff for his teammates. It has to be mental effort as well as physical.”

3. Besides McClellan and Kabongo, is there anyone else that can help pull the Horns out of their doldrums?

In the loss to OKState, Texas got a game-high 15 points from Ioannis Papapetrou, who has made some strides in the second half of the season by scoring in double figures in six of the past eight games. The Horns also got a career-high 13 points off the bench from Demarcus Holland, who also played 35 minutes, his most as a Longhorn.

“Texas is going through a lot of the same things we went through last year,” Oklahoma State coach Travis Ford said. “They are young and playing without a guy they thought would be a big part of their team, which is what we had to endure, too. It’s tough to get in a rhythm when you don’t have all the pieces to the puzzle. But it would be foolish to count out Texas because of their overall talent level.”

The Horns even trotted out their ninth different lineup in 23 games: Papapetrou and McClellan along with Price Ibeh, Julien Lewis and Javan Felix.

“The bottom line is that we don’t know how to play as a team – after all this time we are still not buying into what we are trying to do,” Papapetrou said. “Guys are still worried about personal stats. Losing like this is embarrassing.”

Although Oklahoma State was last in the Big 12 in 3-point defense (teams were averaging 39 percent shooting on 3s against the Cowboys), Texas hit just 1-of-18 from beyond the 3-point arc in its 72-59 loss.

“We are frustrated and embarrassed, and I think the team is just baffled,” Barnes said. “I wish I could show you the way we practiced the past few days and then…I can’t answer it… when the lights go on it seems to just…I can’t figure it out.”

4. Can a 27-point loss to Baylor spur the Texas women’s team to greater heights?

Yes, if the Longhorns can learn from the run-up to the Baylor game.

“I would like to see us prepare and practice for every game the way we did for this game,” Aston said. “That is the kind of effort that can get us back to where we want to be. We have to just keep pushing and working hard to get better. We had some things going tonight, but we couldn’t take enough advantage of some of them.”

“I think we are understanding things better,” Aston added. “It’s been hard to gauge our strides because there have been moments when we’ve made improvement and developed some continuity and flow and then had things happen and made us step back.”

The loss dropped the Texas women’s team to 9-13 overall and 2-9 in Big 12 play.

“I thought Texas played extremely hard – it was a very physical game,” Baylor coach Kim Mulkey said. “You can’t put a timeframe on assembling a great team, but Karen has some building blocks already in place.”

“We are maturing,” Aston said. “This was good for (Texas) and maybe they see that. I think we can be a really good basketball team but we are young and immature and need to learn to prepare at the highest level for all our opponents. Once we learn that, we will take a big step forward.”

5. What were the two brightest spots for the Texas women’s team against Baylor, arguably the best women’s team of the 21^st century?

Plenty of heads were turned by the play of precocious freshman Imani McGee-Stafford (a tall drink of water herself at 6 feet 7 inches) and her effort against Griner, one of the greatest women’s players in collegiate history.

McGee-Stafford scored 13 points and pulled down a career-high 18 rebounds while matched up primarily with Griner (who had 14 points, 12 in the first half, a career-tying low three rebounds and eight blocks).” Texas has talent on the floor, and that starts with McGee-Stafford,” Mulkey said.

McGee-Stafford said Imani that Griner is like her own “human measuring stick.”

“I was always compared to her in high school because I am 6-foot-7, and I was able to out rebound her tonight,” McGee-Stafford said. “I can’t say I am pleased with this game because we lost, but at least I didn’t feel like she just abused me tonight.”

The other standout against Baylor was freshman guard Empress Davenport, who also had 13 points playing against the Lady Bears’ top-shelf point guard Odyssey Sims.

“These freshmen are getting an excellent learning experience by working their way through the Big 12 schedule,” Aston said. “I have two freshman guards that ran the point tonight [Celina Rodrigo also handled the ball for Texas] against the best point guard in the country [Sims] so that should help them understand the level that they need to be at all the time.”

 

[/s2If]
[s2If current_user_is_not(s2member_level2) OR current_user_is_not(s2member_level3) OR current_user_is_not(s2member_level5) OR current_user_is_not(s2member_level6)]

The rest of this article is available to Digital Subscribers only. Login or Subscribe to continue reading.
[/s2If]