Lon Kruger shows Bruce Weber another way to handle foul trouble in latest K-State loss
By now, anyone who pays close attention to Kansas State basketball knows that Bruce Weber aggressively protects his players the moment they encounter foul trouble.
Any time a starter picks up two early fouls, Weber benches him for the remainder of the first half. Any time a key contributor reaches four fouls, Weber removes him from the game until the final moments.
There are exceptions to those coaching rules, but Weber mostly sticks to his ways and the belief that fouls are directly intertwined with playing time.
Oklahoma coach Lon Kruger believes in a different strategy, and it was a major reason why the Sooners rallied to defeat the Wildcats 66-61 in the Big 12 opener for both teams on Saturday at Lloyd Noble Center.
What did Kruger do? He let Wichita State transfer Austin Reaves stay in the game after picking up his fourth foul with 4 minutes, 43 seconds remaining.
The result? Reaves showed the tenacity of an alpha dog and made several important shots down the stretch for the Sooners. He scored 21 points and his team finished the game on a 12-0 run. Oklahoma would not have won without Reaves on the court in crunch time.
“He had a good roll going,” Kruger said. “He has played a lot of basketball. He knows not to make that reach that might pick up a silly foul. He was aware of it and I think he handled it well. The zone might have helped him a little bit when he had four fouls, but he handled it well.”
On the other side of the court, Weber chose to bench his leading scorer when he picked up his fourth foul at the 8:37 mark of the second half.
Xavier Sneed had scored 22 points at that point and was coming off a hot stretch when he delivered a four-point play and followed it up with a corner three on the next possession. He was feeling it. But with K-State leading 51-46, Weber decided to try and survive with his best player on the bench.
Sneed didn’t return until Oklahoma pulled within 61-60 with 2:06 left.
K-State drew up a play to get Sneed an open look from three-point range on its next possession, but Sneed misfired long. Neither he nor his team scored again.
While Sneed was on the bench, Reaves found his groove. Sneed was the primary defender against Reaves in the first half, and the Wildcats limited him to three points. But without Sneed in the game, Reaves found confidence and scored 18 in the second half.
“That’s when Reaves got going,” Weber said. “We don’t have probably old enough, gutsy guys to match up on him. We had to put DaJuan (Gordon) on him. ... We had Reaves pretty well under control, not the last six minutes when he got cooking and made the plays that gave them a chance.”
Sneed didn’t express any frustration with Weber’s decision to send him to the bench with four fouls. The senior swingman blamed himself for putting him in that position.
“It’s my fault,” Sneed said. “I have got to learn to stop fouling.”
Weber defended his strategy by saying he needed to save Sneed for the final minutes. This had the look of a close game, and if the Wildcats needed someone to make a shot in crunch time he wanted to be able to rely on Sneed.
“You don’t want to get him back in and have him foul out and then you don’t have him down the stretch,” Weber said. “You just kept hoping we would hold on.”
Kruger did his best to protect Reaves from picking up foul No. 5 by switching to a zone defense.
It’s impossible to say one coaching method is better than the other in all situations. Both Weber and Kruger have won lots of games over the years and taken teams to the Final Four. Their strategies clearly work for them.
But it’s easy to tell which one worked better on Saturday. Kruger trusted his leading scorer after he picked up his fourth foul, and Oklahoma won because Kruger had that trust.
This story was originally published January 4, 2020 at 4:47 PM.