For the first time in more than a month, the Texas Longhorns have a winning streak.

While two wins in a row is not a whole lot to crow about, Wednesday night’s 69-59 victory over the Oklahoma State Cowboys is a huge step in the right direction for a team that had lost six out of its last ten. The win pushes the Longhorns to 8-6 in league play, and into a three-way tie for fourth with Baylor and Texas A&M, two teams they will face — on the road — in their last three games.

Things didn’t start off beautifully for Texas, as Oklahoma State shot nearly 50% from the field for a majority of the first half, including a 6-of-12 mark from behind the arc. The Longhorns did force eight turnovers in the first half, but the flurry of long-range scoring for the Pokes ensured that Texas could find no breathing room in the first twenty minutes.

James Anderson also couldn’t find much breathing room for those first twenty minutes, as Justin Mason and solid help defense limited the Big 12 Player of the Year candidate to just six first half points. Five of those came in the first three minutes, but Anderson was held scoreless from the field for more than 24 minutes after that.

In the second half, it was the entire Oklahoma State offense that couldn’t breathe. The Pokes were limited to 2-of-10 shooting from behind the arc, and shot just 33% from the field. Anderson was able to add another eight points to his total, but OSU managed just 24 total points in the final twenty minutes. The Texas defense took all of its little lapses from the first half and completely eliminated them in the second.

Beyond the defense, the biggest storyline of the night came from the biggest player on the court. Against a much smaller Oklahoma State lineup, Dexter Pittman finally turned in the performance fans have been waiting for since Fayetteville. After Texas mustered only six points in the paint during the first half, the start of the second half was all about Pittman. The Longhorns made a concerted effort to get him the ball inside, and his strong moves with the ball made it clear he wasn’t going to be stopped.

Dexter’s final line on the night was 16 points, eight rebounds, and three blocks in 20 minutes. If that is the kind of production Texas can get from him down the stretch, there’s not much more you can ask for. Pittman is not a guy who needs to be playing 25-plus minutes per game because it limits his effectiveness. Dexter can’t hang with run-and-gun teams, and big men with long range can pull him out of the paint and limit his defensive presence. But in games like this one, he’s one of the most effective weapons the Longhorns have, and he’ll have to produce at that level the rest of the way.

As always, Damion James turned in a huge effort for the Horns. He knocked down a ton of midrange jumpers in the first half to kickstart the offense, and pulled down seven boards on the night. His 19 points were certainly important, but what was much more notable was his 6-of-8 performance at the line. Heading into the game, James was shooting just 64% from the charity stripe.

Also impressive was Jordan Hamilton, who did so many little things right tonight. For one, his defense was much improved. Even when he was beat my his man, it wasn’t for lack of effort. Oftentimes this season it has seemed like Hamilton only cared to play on one side of the ball, but not in this game. Not only did he move laterally and pressure the ball on defense, but he made smart decisions with the ball on offense. He took the open three-point looks against the zone in the first half, then took the ball to the rim when OSU played the perimeter later in the game. And, most importantly, Hamilton passed the ball instead of forcing it when there was nothing there.

Apart from the continual free throw woes (21-of-36 on the night), the biggest disappointment in this game was J’Covan Brown. Coach Rick Barnes inserted the freshman back into the starting lineup after limiting him to just five minutes against Texas Tech on Saturday. Unfortunately, Brown seemed to be trying to prove himself the entire time and looked completely uncomfortable on the floor. When J’Covan is playing freely, attacking the defense, and finding his open teammates, the Longhorns are tough to stop. But if Brown is going to respond to the spotlight the way he did tonight, Texas is going to have to struggle through the rest of the year with a point guard by committee.

Looking ahead

The regular season sweep of Oklahoma State has positioned the Longhorns to make a late-season push for one of the first-round byes in the league’s conference tournament. Texas, A&M, and Baylor are all tied for fourth place, and are just a game behind Missouri in third. The Tigers still have games left with Kansas and Kansas State, while the Longhorns travel to both College Station and Waco. With just three games left on the schedule, everything is truly still up in the air.

The Longhorns return to the Erwin Center as victors, having withstood a late charge from Texas Tech to secure a narrow 71-67 win on Saturday. But while the victory was huge, it was a loss for Texas that loomed even larger. Dogus Balbay went down early in the first half with an ACL tear that has sidelined him for the rest of the year. Coupled with the November injury to Varez Ward, the once-deep Longhorn backcourt is now in total disarray.

Texas managed to beat Oklahoma State in their first meeting, but a huge reason for the win was the defensive performance of Balbay against OSU superstar James Anderson. After scoring 22 of his team’s 34 first-half points, Anderson was held to just four points in the second half. Without Balbay on the court tonight, Anderson could have a career game.

If you need a refresher on OSU’s style of basketball or their key players, click here for the preview from the first match-up. If you don’t, let’s dive right into our keys for tonight’s game……

Keys to the game

First and foremost, Texas will have to find a way to shut down James Anderson. We hate to belabor a point, but without Balbay, the Longhorns are going to have to find a way to keep the Cowboy guard from going off for 30-plus points. At 6’6″, he’s a tough match-up for Texas, especially when you consider that the best defenders Rick Barnes has on his roster are a pair of 6’2″ guards in Avery Bradley and Justin Mason. While Jordan Hamilton is a better match-up physically for Anderson, his defense consists mostly of watching people blow past him and then compounding the mistake with fouls from behind.

While Anderson is much taller than the Texas backcourt, the Cowboys are actually much smaller across the board than Texas. The Longhorns must control the defensive glass in order to limit the number of Oklahoma State possessions. The Pokes don’t turn the ball over that often, so giving them second and third chances will only serve to keep OSU in the game and wear out an already thin Texas lineup.

In the same vein, the Longhorns also need to take advantage of their size inside. Whether that means Dexter Pittman needs to step up and have the kind of game we haven’t seen from him since Fayetteville, or if it means that Gary Johnson has a second-straight career game by hustling down low, the fact remains that Texas must make its easy looks. The first time these teams met, the Longhorns missed a lot of shots just a few feet from the basket. Had Jordan Hamilton not had a magical game, Texas would have ended up on the losing end.

The biggest thing we will be looking at tonight is how J’Covan Brown handles point guard duties. As we wrote yesterday, failing to play him at this point amounts to giving up on the season. There will certainly be hiccups along the way, but now this is undoubtedly J’Covan’s team to run, and we are very interested in seeing how he handles the pressure.

Texas hasn’t won two games in a row in over a month, a stretch in which the team has lost six out of ten. Tonight provides the Longhorns an opportunity to finally string a pair of wins together, and to position itself for quite a battle in the league standings during this last week and a half.

The five teams in places three through seven are separated by just one game, and with only four more games on each team’s schedule, there is little room for error. A Texas win tonight means that there is quite a bit on the line this Saturday in College Station. A loss likely means that this former No. 1 team won’t even earn a bye in its conference tournament.

We knew as early as Saturday’s post-game press conference that Dogus Balbay could very well be done for the year. Coach Rick Barnes told reporters he didn’t expect good news, and he was proven a soothsayer when Sunday’s MRI confirmed an ACL tear which will sideline the point guard until next season.

Without Balbay in the lineup for most of the game against Tech, Barnes relied on Justin Mason and Jai Lucas to handle duties at the point guard position. J’Covan Brown was limited to just five minutes and didn’t even see the court until just before halftime. Barnes was sending a message to his freshman, namely “that [Texas] can win games without [Brown].”

The thing is, Texas nearly didn’t. With Brown hardly playing, the Longhorn offense stalled out late in the game and the Red Raiders almost completed a double-digit comeback in just minutes. If Texas can barely top Texas Tech without Brown, what makes Barnes thinks the Longhorns can beat Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, A&M, or Baylor without him?

Lucas is not an effective point guard. He came to Texas because Florida wasn’t going to play him at the point, so clearly he was told he would get that opportunity on the Forty Acres. Well, he’s had that opportunity, and it’s not going to work out. Jai is nowhere near the 5’10” he is listed at, and he lacks the quickness to get enough separation off the dribble to get any open looks. In the last two games, there were two different fast breaks which ended in blocked shots because Lucas tried to take it the entire way on his own.

Jai is most useful when he can actually get open looks from behind the arc, and the only way to do that is to play him off the ball and run screens to get him loose. Defensively, he gives up far too much height to get any helpful pressure on the perimeter, so most opposing guards can shoot threes even if he is in their shorts. Lucas is not the team’s answer at point guard, and he should truly be limited to a couple of short stints each game where Texas tries to free him up for some open threes.

Mason, meanwhile, is going to be needed for a ton of minutes each game. There’s practically no depth in the backcourt, and his play on the defensive end is going to be critical as the calendar turns into March. But he struggled to shake his man off the dribble late in the game on Saturday, most likely due to fatigue from suddenly being saddled with so many minutes. If Mason is going to be too tired to blow past people late in the games, there is no question that Brown has to handle the point guard duties in those crucial minutes.

J’Covan has certainly had growing pains this year, be it his early-season turnover woes, his occasional quick-trigger on shots, or his lapses on defense. The questionable D even irritated his coach enough enough to land Brown in the dreaded doghouse. But unless Rick Barnes decides to hand the reins to J’Covan in these final weeks, there is little hope that the Longhorns are going to be able to muster any sort of run in the post-season. It may be a learning process in the last four games and into the Big 12 tournament, but J’Covan Brown is going to have to be this team’s point guard. Refusing to play him at this point is simply stubbornness to the point of self-detriment.

Not much time to do a proper game preview for this one, but fortunately you can find most everything you’ll need to know about the Red Raiders in the preview from the first meeting of these two teams. Texas won that game 95-83, fueled in large part by surprising offensive outbursts from Dogus Balbay and Justin Mason.

The big difference in this afternoon’s match-up is that Tech will once again have the services of Darko Cohaderavic and D’walyn Roberts, two frontcourt players who will completely change the complexion of the game. The Red Raiders were incredibly thin when these teams first played each other, and the high pace of the game made it easier for Texas to pull away late despite playing absolutely horrible defense. There’s very little chance that will be the case this afternoon.

Fans can probably also expect to see Tech work the ball inside a little more than they did in the first meeting. Coach Pat Knight likes to try to get Cohaderavic going early, not only to earn the easy points inside, but to open things up for his other slashing, athletic wings and guards. A lot of responsibility will fall on the shoulders of the Longhorn frontcourt to ensure that gameplan doesn’t come to fruition.

In addition, Texas also will likely not enjoy another breakout performance from Balbay or Mason. Neither has played at that level since that game, and both have had their minutes significantly cut. Fortunately, J’Covan Brown and Jordan Hamilton have stepped up and performed admirably in their expanded roles. Texas will need solid offensive games out of that pair of freshmen in order to produce this afternoon.

Finally, it must also be noted that United Spirit Arena is a surprisingly tough place for visiting teams to win at. It’s not that there are loud, intimidating crowds here in Lubbock. And it’s not that Tech usually fields good teams that catch even better teams off guard. But for whatever reason, ranked teams often leave United Spirit with a loss, and for a Texas squad that has piled up quite a few of those L’s in recent weeks, it’s something to be concerned about.

It has been a long, interesting month for the Longhorns. On January 17th, Texas was ranked No. 1 in the nation and held a pristine 17-0 mark. Just a day later, the Horns would start a slide in which they lost five out of seven games and plummeted from the upper crust of college basketball. But on Saturday, Texas once again looked like the dominant team that fans watched the first two months of the season. In a 40-point beating of Nebraska, the Longhorns were highly efficient on both ends of the court, and the much-heralded freshmen finally all put it together in the same game.

Texas’ recent performance has made fans hesitant to get excited once again. While the Longhorns certainly looked unstoppable on Saturday, their skittish performances the previous four weeks have planted a seed of doubt in the minds of most. Tonight, the Longhorns will find out whether or not they have turned a corner. In facing a very tough Missouri team in a very intimidating road enviornment, Texas will likely find what their true identity is. Are they a scuttling group that is squandering immeasurable talent? Or are they a team that is finally going to hit their stride, just in time for March?

By the numbers

As fans of college basketball are well aware, Mike Anderson and the Tigers play an up-tempo, pressure style of hoops they have dubbed “The Fastest 40 Minutes in Basketball.” Anderson was once as assistant under Nolan Richardson at Arkansas, where the “40 Minutes of Hell” led to a national title, and Mike’s re-branding of the time-tested strategy actually led the Tigers to last year’s Elite Eight.

Missouri leads the Big 12 with 20.4 turnovers forced per game. The impact of that pressure defense is magnified by the fact that the Tigers only cough it up about thirteen times per game, so the differential gives the Tigers a bunch of extra possessions. In addition, 11.4 of the turnovers that Mizzou forces each game come in the form of steals, which is tops in the nation. Keeping the ball in play — rather than forcing TOs on passes out of bounds — gives the Tigers more points in transition.

That transition game is a big reason why the Tiger offense is ranked 42nd nationally in efficiency by stat guru Ken Pomeroy. Missouri’s gameplan can often feel like a tiny snowball building into an avalanche, as one turnover leads to an easy bucket, which lets them set up their full-court press, which forces another turnover and a layup, and they get to set up their defense…… You get the picture.

Tonight’s game is likely to be a full-on track meet. The Tigers average 72.1 possessions per game, which is the 20th-fastest tempo in the nation. (As you can see, the “Fastest 40” moniker is a bit of false advertising.) The Longhorns, meanwhile, average 74.5 possessions, which is 7th-fastest in the NCAAs. Unless Texas decides to make a conscious effort to slow the pace, this game will be played at break-neck speed.

When Missouri isn’t scoring their points off of transition, their half-court sets are very impressive. Good, strong cuts and quick ball movement earn the Tigers quite a few open looks, and strong dribble penetration leads to open three-point shots on the kick-outs. Missouri makes over 38% of their looks from long range, so Texas must make sure they don’t let the Tigers get too hot from behind the arc.

Meet the Tigers

After losing DeMarre Carroll and Leo Lyons to the NBA draft, Missouri needed to find a way to replace their 31 points and 13 rebounds per game. Fortunately for Coach Anderson, his lineup is filled with players who possess similar skills and body types. While no one has quite filled the frontcourt void left by these two stars, the Tigers are finding that their system and interchangeable personnel allows for quick reloading from year to year.

This year, Missouri’s senior leaders come in the form of J.T. Tiller and Zaire Taylor. Tiller was the Big 12’s top defensive player last season, and he’s picked up right where he left off. He has 32 steals so far this year, while only fouling out of one game. His offensive skillset is limited mostly to driving the lane for easy looks, so Tiller is fortunately one Tiger that Texas won’t have to watch on the perimeter.

Texas fans should remember Taylor quite well. Last year, he converted an old-fashioned three-point play in the final seconds to defeat the Longhorns, and hit a short jumper against Kansas to win in the Border War just a few days later. Nicknamed “Big Shot” for his heroics in those two games, Taylor is a pretty good outside shooter (39.7% behind the arc), and is averaging eight points per game.

The backcourt is where all the depth is for Missouri this year, but most of the Tiger guards are much taller than those of the Longhorns. The tallest of them all is 6’6″ Kim English, a sophomore guard who’s best known for sleeping in the gym. He’s leading the team in scoring with nearly 15 points per game, and much of it comes from long range. English has knocked down 53 triples on the year, and is shooting 37.6% from the perimeter.

Another long-range threat in the backcourt is sophomore Marcus Denmon. In his second season, he’s stepped into the spotlight, making more than 44% of his three-point attempts while scoring about eleven points per game. If there is one player that Texas absolutely cannot lose track of tonight, it’s Denmon.

While the Missouri lineup is littered with guys from 6’6″ to 6’8″ who are all quick, athletic, and have great wingpan, the most disruptive has to be Justin Safford. At 6’8″, his wingspan is much longer than it should be, and it makes him great at denial on entry passes and has helped him log 18 blocked shots this year. Safford didn’t see a lot of action down the stretch last season, but he’s averaging 21 minutes per game in his junior campaign and is consistently making solid contributions.

While Safford is long and defensively disruptive, the true shot blocker on the team is Keith Ramsey. He led the team in swats last year, and is second on the squad this year with 29 blocks. He’s not much of a scorer, but he is one of the only real frontcourt presences on a perimeter-oriented team. Ramsey will be relied on tonight to clean the glass and deny the Texas bigs down low.

The other frontcourt presence is sophomore Laurence Bowers. Hailing from Memphis, Bowers has been described by the coaches as the team’s most complete player, and in just his second season, he’s already starting to show why. He leads the team in blocked shots and rebounds, is third in scoring, and even has 27 steals. While Bowers is already making an impact in the Big 12, there’s no doubt that he is going to be an absolute star in the coming years.

Each of the seven players above is averaging more than 20 minutes a game, with none of them playing for more than 26.7 per contest. Anderson loves to constantly change his lineups, running essentially nine deep in an effort to wear down the opponents and keep his own players fresh enough to keep up the pressure. Texas is also a very deep team, but in recent weeks Rick Barnes has been working to pare down his core rotation. It will be interesting to see how Texas uses its personnel in response to Anderson’s substitution style.

The other two players who see significant minutes for the Tigers are freshman Michael Dixon and sophomore guard Miguel Paul. Dixon was Mr. Basketball for the state of Missouri as a high school senior last year, and he’s made a solid impression on the Big 12 so far as a freshman. He’s quick, smart with the basketball, and has a sound grasp of what Anderson’s defense requires from him. Paul is also a quick guard and a serviceable shooter, but doesn’t make that much of an impact on the stat sheet in his twelve minutes per game.

Keys to the game

While it may be painfully obvious already, the number one thing Texas must do tonight is control the basketball. Missouri’s pressure defense is even more effective in front of their rowdy crowd, so the Longhorns can’t afford to fuel the fire by wasting possessions and giving up easy fast break points. A lot of this will come down to the play of J’Covan Brown and Jordan Hamilton, who have been two of the biggest turnover culprits in the past. As freshmen, they’ve only seen a handful of road arenas. Hopefully their experience at the electric Octagon of Doom was enough to prepare them for tonight.

Along the same lines, Texas must remain poised. At some point, Missouri will go on a run. With their style of play and the Texas penchant for scoring droughts, it’s practically a certainty. But the Longhorns must respond tonight when they get metaphorically punched in the mouth, or else they will find themselves with a deficit they will be unable to overcome.

In addition, Texas must efficiently use Dexter Pittman. In this type of game, he’s not going to be able to play for very long. But when he is on the court, he will undoubtedly be a tough match-up for the smaller Missouri lineup. If the Longhorns can get a nice chunk of points from Big Pitt, and maybe even pick up some fouls on the thin Tiger frontcourt, it could change the complexion of the game.

Finally, one brief reminder about the perimeter threat from the Tigers. Mizzou’s excellent three-point accuracy was mentioned throughout the player introductions, but Longhorn fans know all-too-well how Texas opponents tend to get ridiculously hot from long range. If Missouri shoots like the Sooners did in Norman or the Red Raiders did in Austin, there’s very little chance Texas leaves Columbia with a win.

The big picture

In terms of the conference standings, this game is huge. With just five games remaining after tonight’s contest, there is very little time to make up ground and practically no room for error. Kansas State, Texas A&M, Baylor, Missouri, and Texas have separated themselves from the pack and are all log-jammed from spots two through six in the standings.

If the Longhorns want a bye in the first round of the conference tournament, they have to win the remaining head-to-head meetings against the Aggies, Bears, and Tigers. Lose tonight, and it’s very likely the Horns will be playing the Big 12’s 11- or 12-seed on the second Wednesday in March.