Kamau Stokes heats up, and other thoughts from K-State’s win over Southern Miss

The Kansas State Wildcats defeated the Southern Mississippi Golden Eagles 55-51 on Wednesday at Bramlage Coliseum.

Here are some thoughts from the basketball game:

Kamau Stokes caught fire at an ideal time

Make no mistake, Stokes was the hero.

He didn’t single-handedly guide the Wildcats to a closer-than-expected victory over Southern Miss. But there’s no way they would have won this game without him.

Stokes, a senior point guard, led a huge turnaround by hitting a mid-range jumper with Southern Miss leading 35-19 early in the second half. The basket was met with little enthusiasm at the time, but he brought the home crowd to life moments later by swishing back-to-back threes.

He wasn’t done. Stokes kept his hot streak going by calling for the ball and sinking a deep jumper and then another three.

“I was feeling it,” Stokes said, “and then credit my teammates. They got me open with screens and moved the ball well. I give them a lot of credit for that.”

All the while, K-State made life miserable for Southern Miss with stifling defense. By the time Stokes’ teammates got involved on offense, the Wildcats were on a 24-2 run and leading 43-37.

K-State fans could suddenly back away from the panic button. That was enough to win.

“Stokes got hot and hit four threes on us,” Southern Miss coach Doc Sadler said. “That was the difference in the ball game.”

Stokes finished with a season-high 18 points, with all but two of them coming in the second half. K-State needed someone to step up without star forward Dean Wade in the lineup and Stokes did exactly that.

“When you’re a man down you always have to take ownership,” Stokes said. “Then especially being a senior and one of the leaders on this team, it’s definitely on us when we aren’t playing well. Somebody had to step up. I just took it upon myself to get everybody going, to turn the energy up and things turned out great. I started making shots, Barry (Brown) started making shots and things turned out good.”

It’s been an up-and-down season for Stokes. He entered this game averaging 9.2 points. He hasn’t been on the same level as Brown or Wade.

But Stokes can be one of the best players on the team when he gets hot.

Perhaps this will help him find a consistent shooting rhythm moving forward.

“He got going,” K-State coach Bruce Weber said. “He has put some time in the gym and got his shot going. It’s great for him. I’m happy for him. He made big plays when we needed it.”

No Dean Wade. Yes problems

If you thought it was going to be easy for K-State to survive without Wade, well, you might want to think again.

Things did not go as smoothly against Southern Miss on Wednesday as they did last March. Back then, K-State didn’t seem bothered by the loss of its best player and fought its way into the Elite Eight while Wade was sidelined with a stress fracture in his left foot.

He is now out 3-8 weeks with a torn tendon in his right foot. Things may be more difficult this time around.

Wade is K-State’s leading scorer and rebounder. Without him, the Wildcats scored just 19 points in the first half against Southern Miss and needed to rely on the hot outside shooting of one player to storm back and win.

Credit Xavier Sneed for stepping up and grabbing 14 rebounds, but few others played with urgency. The Wildcats will need a better effort to win future games, starting Saturday against Vanderbilt at Sprint Center.

No outside shooting

The Wildcats are not a good three-point shooting team.

That’s more fact than opinion at this point. K-State entered this game shooting 30.9 percent from the outside and then made 4 of 16 shots from distance against Southern Miss.

Stokes was the only K-State player to make a three-pointer. While he went 4 of 6 from beyond the arc, his teammates missed all 10 of their attempts.

Weber values defense and has his team playing at a high level on that end of the floor, but this team won’t reach its full potential until it finds away to hit from the outside. That seems like a big challenge at the moment.

This story was originally published December 19, 2018 at 10:38 PM.