After four straight losses – the last three of which weren’t particularly close – Kansas State needed a slumpbuster and the schedule delivered Monday night.
Mississippi Valley State was picked to finish last in the SWAC again after winning just three games last season and has just one win this season, against the Mississippi University for Women (yes, they have a D3 men’s team). So it’s safe to say if the Cats couldn’t win by 20+ we would have needed to consider just shutting the program down.
Fortunately,
K-State came through with a convincing yet not impressive 108-49 win. The best thing we can say about this one is the Cats kept their energy up the entire 40 minutes, which is a difficult thing to do in a game like this but doesn’t really mean a whole lot for competitive games going forward.
PJ Haggerty led the Cats with 28 points on 14 shots, making 5 of his 6 3-point attempts. Nate Johnson added 14 points, 6 assists and 5 steals.
Despite a couple missed threes against the MVSU zone and one really terrible pass in transition that resulted in a turnover, the Cats jumped out to an early 8-2 lead thanks to two steals produced by pressure man-to-man defense. The Delta Devils just didn’t have the athletes to do much offensively against Kansas State and made only 3 of their first 17 field goal attempts.
Haggerty knocked down the Wildcats’ first 3-pointer to fire up some solid outside shooting, leaving MVSU even more helpless defensively against a team it could not hope to stop in the paint given K-State’s considerable size and athleticism advantages. Dorin Buca enjoyed some extended minutes and Marcus Johnson came in late to chuck up some completely unnecessary 3-point shots.
The Cats once again proved they can hit open looks as they made 7 of 14 attempts from long range while outrebounding the Delta Devils 26-14 on the way to a 55-21 halftime lead. There was no let up as K-State ended the first 20 minutes on a 19-3 run.
Kansas State’s 3-point shooting practice continued going well in the second half and they finished with 19, a season-high on 36 attempts. Abdi Bashir knocked down 5 of 10 on his way to 15 points along with 5 assists and David Castillo contributed 19 points with 5 threes, 5 assists and 3 turnovers off the bench.
Michael James led MVSU with 23 points, many of which came on cherrypicking in transition. His team scored a season-low and gave up 100+ for the fourth time this season, including a 120-84 loss at Texas A&M.
THREE IN THE KEY
1) We learned nothing
The reality is how K-State played against the team ranked dead last (365th) in the KenPom rankings was just never going to mean much. Yes, it was still nice to see the shots going in and a lopsided score, and of course it’s easy to share the basketball well when you’ve got that huge cushion and the defense isn’t offering much resistance. But can we really count any of that as progress? Absolutely not.
2) Buca is fun
Some 7-footers are hard to watch. Others are highly entertaining. Happily, Darin Buca falls in the latter category, especially when he’s facing smaller players who aren’t athletic enough to make him look silly. The big man might look like he’s on the verge of collapse from exhaustion at any given time, but he’s always ready for a dunk and showed some decent timing/awareness for his 5 blocks to go with 5 points and 5 rebounds. Time will tell if the Italian can be useful in Big 12 play.
3) Too many turnovers
A distinct athletic advantage couldn’t stop Kansas State from finding stupid ways to give the ball away against an undisciplined but opportunistic defense. The Wildcats turned the ball over 14 times, basically matching their average of 13.5 over the last four games (even with only 6 in the loss to Bowling Green). Most of them came from sloppy and careless plays, or just trying to do too much.
NEXT
K-State faces another real opponent on the road at Creighton, although the Blue Jays aren’t quite at the same level they have been at in recent years. They lost to Iowa State, Nebraska and Gonzaga by double digits, but they also beat Oregon by 10, so this could be a decent measuring stick to see if the Cats have made any notable improvement.
