Austin, Texas — Entering Monday’s 79-76 loss to Texas, Kansas senior Ochai Agbaji was averaging a Big 12-best 20.8 points per game.
20th-ranked Texas knew that, of course, and the Longhorns did everything they could to keep Agbaji from being the guy that beat them.
Most notably, that meant asking senior guard Courtney Ramey to face-guard Agbaji for most of the night, keeping him from even getting a catch, let alone an open shot.
The plan worked to perfection and Texas survived a thriller, in large part thanks to the fact that the UT defense was able to limit Agbaji to just 11 points, one off a season low.
But it wasn’t as if Agbaji had a terrible night shooting the ball or fell into some kind of mistake-filled, awful slump. It was more the fact that the Big 12’s leading scorer was limited to just 7 shots in 38 minutes. He made four of them, but the 7 field goal attempts were by far a season low for Agbaji. The four makes tied a season low.
“Och didn’t have a bad game,” KU coach Bill Self said after the loss. “His numbers weren’t great, but they just put so much emphasis on guarding him.”
Interestingly enough, Agbaji’s previous low for attempts in a game this season came last Saturday, when he shot 5-for-11 in a blowout win over Baylor. Agbaji also was held to 11 shots in a win at Oklahoma, but that was the game where he injured his wrist and missed a big chunk of the first half. Beyond that, most of his four makes on those 11 attempts that night came down the stretch, at winning time, with KU needing every one.
Agbaji found no such luck on Monday night. Even on the do-or-die possession that started with 21.8 seconds remaining and Kansas down by one, Agbaji did not touch the ball.
Self said the play was designed to go to big man David McCormack on the block. Replays show that Harris, if he had thrown it to McCormack, could have been inviting trouble, with Christian Braun’s defender sagging toward McCormack. So, instead of forcing a pass, Harris chose to reverse direction and drove right, turning the ball over on his way to the bucket.
For the entirety of the drive, Ramey was glued to Agbaji above the 3-point line.
“It’s tough when they do that,” Agbaji said of the extra attention UT and other teams have paid to him with the face-guarding strategy. “I was just telling my team, ‘You guys are out there playing 4-on-4.'”
While that is a part of the reason behind the strategy — taking away KU’s best player and trusting that your four are better than the Jayhawks’ next four — Agbaji also can do more to make sure he’s a factor.
He’s been a master of efficiency so far this season, taking good shots and letting the offense come to him more times than not. His 51.3% field goal shooting and 45.8% clip from 3-point range entering Monday night spoke to his efficiency. So did his shooting numbers.
Through KU’s first 22 games, Agbaji was averaging his 20.8 points on just 14.7 attempts per game. He made eight or more field goals in seven of KU’s first eight games but has found things a little tougher in Big 12 play, where some of the country’s best defenses live.
No self-respecting coach is going to stand there and let the front-runner for conference player of the year beat him on his terms. So whether it’s junk defenses, extra physicality, a face-guarding ploy like UT used on Monday night, Agbaji knows that keeping up his scoring pace the rest of the way is going to be tough.
He also knows how to combat it.
“We have to make adjustments with what we’re going to do, offensively, to get me open or get stuff like that,” he said. “But, you know, my main focus is to get my teammates shots and get them open looks.”
It didn’t work on Monday. Agbaji finished with a goose egg in the assists column. Some of that may have been the result of teammates missing shots when Agbaji passed to them. But KU shot 58.3% for the game and was above 60% for much of the night. So it’s not as if the Jayhawks had trouble shooting the ball. Even if they did, Agbaji is experienced enough and smart enough to find ways to get his teammates easier, better, higher-percentage shots. And it likely will be critical that he finds a way to do it as more teams try to do what Texas did to limit his production.
It would be easy for someone who did not watch Monday’s game to look at the box score and conclude that Agbaji’s lower-than-normal point total was the reason Kansas lost.
But it was the number of shots — not points — that was the biggest factor associated with that storyline and Texas got exactly what it hoped to get from the strategy of smothering Agbaji.
