Houston — When Houston stunned Kansas in double overtime at Allen Fieldhouse on Jan. 25, L.J. Cryer’s offensive production had little to do with it. The guard from Katy, Texas, scored just nine points in 48 minutes on that day.
When the two teams faced off again on Monday night, Cryer had 18 by halftime. As the rest of his teammates shot an uncharacteristic 5-for-26 (19.2%) from the field, with no individual player scoring more than four points, Cryer sustained No. 3 Houston against a game group of Jayhawks throughout the first half.
“I think L.J. Cryer’s had success against a lot of folks,” KU coach Bill Self said. “I think he’s a bad man.”
As the biggest underdog by point spread it has been in at least two decades according to OddsShark data, KU fought valiantly all night at Fertitta Center. But even with Cryer kept off the court for much of the second half by foul trouble, Houston had enough offense to save its senior night with a 65-59 victory.
KU center Hunter Dickinson scored 17 points, but did so on just 6-for-13 shooting and committed seven turnovers, including a pair late with KU down three points.
“They’re super aggressive, super long arms and they use that to their advantage, super athletic,” Dickinson said. “So they do a really good job of playing in the passing lanes. Obviously they trapped me today and I didn’t do a good job of handling that, so I got to get in the lab and work on that better, to be able to help my teammates out more when teams double-team me.”
KJ Adams added 15 points of his own and David Coit scored 14 in a particularly gutsy performance off the bench on a day when most of KU’s guards were nonfactors.
As a team, the Jayhawks gave the ball away 20 times and conceded 17 offensive rebounds, which resulted in Houston attempting 26 more shots than KU.
“That’s 37 times they had a chance to at least shoot the ball that was created by us or them, where we only took advantage of 13 situations in the same thing, and that was the difference in the game,” Self said.
“When they miss more shots than we take … it’s tough to win any game,” Dickinson added. “We competed, but in the end they still whooped our butt on the offensive boards.”
Cryer finished with 22 points, with his lone field goal of the second half one of the biggest of the night, and Emanuel Sharp added a dozen. Two more Cougars scored 10 points apiece for the sort of well-balanced effort KU lacked.
The early stages of the game appeared to be trending in KU’s favor before the Jayhawks conceded three offensive rebounds on a single possession that led to an off-balance 3-pointer by Cryer. Cryer’s bucket kicked off a run of seven straight points before Dickinson put back his own miss to make it 11-8 in the Cougars’ favor, entering a belated under-16 timeout with 13 minutes to go in the first half.
With both offenses stuck in the mud, neither team scored for a period of over three minutes until a pair of free throws by Mylik Wilson made it 15-10. Coit and Cryer traded a 3 apiece on the following two possessions and did so again not long afterward. Cryer had 13 points in his first 12 minutes.
The Jayhawks tied the game for the first time on a pair of free throws by KJ Adams before committing their seventh and eighth turnovers of the first half (compared to two for Houston at the time). They then briefly went ahead on an alley-oop dunk from Adams to Flory Bidunga, as UH’s Terrance Arceneaux came up empty on a pair of off-balance jumpers, only for Cryer to take the lead back off botched ball-screen coverage that led to an open 3.
KU conceded a putback to JoJo Tugler before Zeke Mayo was able to rattle in a contested layup at the horn and make it 30-27 in Houston’s favor. That bucket was the first for any of the Jayhawks’ trio of starting guards, who were previously a combined 0-for-3 for zero points.
A stepback 3-pointer by Milos Uzan, Houston’s point guard who sat most of the first half with two early fouls, gave the Cougars an early boost, but Adams responded by scoring five straight, including a three-point play on which he drew Cryer’s third foul.
“I thought he was great,” Self said of Adams. “What he did best was ball-screen defense and he did a good job on (J’Wan) Roberts, without question.”
Coit picked Roberts’ pocket to set up Dajuan Harris Jr. for a go-ahead layup with 16 minutes to go, but again UH didn’t let it last, even in the absence of Cryer. A pair of 3-pointers by Uzan and Sharp put the Cougars back ahead 48-42 at the midway point of the second half.
Later, with Houston clinging to a 52-50 advantage with 6:18 to go, freshman Rakease Passmore, playing extensively on a poor night for both Rylan Griffen and AJ Storr, was called for a foul on a 3-point attempt by Sharp, who made all three free throws.
The Jayhawks had some success throwing a full-court press at UH and got the margin down to 57-54 with the ball in their hands, but Dickinson turned it over twice in a row.
KU played some of its best defense of the night trailing 59-56 and forced a wild shot by Uzan, but the rebound slipped away from the Jayhawks and Cryer — scoreless for the first 18 minutes of the half — snagged it and put it back to give Houston a two-possession lead.
From there it was a familiar pattern: KU turnover, Houston offensive rebound, Houston offensive rebound again.
Coit gave the Jayhawks a chance by hitting his fourth 3-pointer with 20.1 seconds to go to make it 61-59, benefiting from a missed front end of a one-and-one by Ja’Vier Francis. But Sharp got the next chance to shoot and made both free throws.
Mayo threw away the ensuing inbound when Harris fell over.
“Each play matters, and each play’s magnified under that four-minute mark, and I think we just didn’t make enough plays,” Dickinson said. “Obviously we gave up three or four offensive rebounds in that stretch where we really needed them. They kind of were backbreakers for us. I think that was probably the theme of the game there, was those offensive rebounds that we needed.”
The Jayhawks, who fell to 19-11 and 10-9 in league play, will return to Lawrence to host Big 12 newcomer Arizona, currently ranked No. 24, at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday. KU will put its streak of having won every regular-season home finale since 1984 on the line.
AP Photo/David J. Phillip
