The Lloyd Noble Center was rocking on Saturday in a way it hasn’t been in quite some time in Oklahoma’s hugely important 75-68 home win over No. 9 Kansas.
The Sooners entered the game playing their best basketball of the season, but were going into quite possibly their most difficult stretch of games they will have on the schedule the entire year. This game was very important, and both the team and fans knew it.
“It was an expected big time battle,” Lon Kruger said after the game. “Both teams fought like crazy. Buckets were kind of hard to come by at times on both ends of the floor but again, just proud of our guys. This is a game that obviously could have gone either way and the guys hung in there.”
After a fast start for the Jayhawks offensively, the Oklahoma defense really stiffened up and got back to the level it had been performing at over the last couple of weeks. That was a large reason for the Sooners being able to outlast a Kansas team that was playing with high-level urgency after dropping their last two games.
“Kansas is good, so it wasn’t easy to score points,” Kruger said. “I thought our guys really battled defensively.”
The Sooners were led once again by De’Vion Harmon who has been simply dynamite on the offensive end in a time where Austin Reaves has been in a bit of a slump and Brady Manek has missed time and is still trying to get his legs under him. Harmon’s 22 points today were absolutely critical.
“No one puts more time in before practice, after practice,” Kruger said on Harmon. “Competes hard, plays hard everyday in practice. So any time a guy is doing that, you want very much for him to have huge success and De’Vion is doing that right now.”
The atmosphere for the game was certainly the strongest it has been for any game this season. The crowd had an energy much closer to that of a packed crowd, perhaps sparked by the high volume of Kansas fans in the building.
“It was a lot louder in there than we thought it was going to be,” De’Vion Harmon said. “Especially due to COVID and it being a morning tip-off. But the atmosphere was good and we just fed off of the energy.”
The win moves Oklahoma to 9-4 on the season and gives some much-needed padding to their NCAA Tournament resume. Going into a tough stretch that features many ranked teams, getting this win felt essential for the Sooners and could be just what they needed to start to get onto a roll.
“You just build on it,” Austin Reaves said. “A win like this, I mean you go into tomorrow and there was a lot of things that wasn’t good and you can really build on that. So yeah, I think that this was a really good win for us to build on and just move forward.”
Oklahoma won’t get the chance to enjoy this one for long, for a trip to Austin to face No. 4 Texas looms up next on Tuesday night.
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