By Jerry Hill
Baylor Bear Insider
KANSAS CITY, Mo. – All year long, second-ranked Baylor's had other players step up when one or more of its all-conference guards has an off-night shooting.
Not this time.
With Jared Butler and Davion Mitchell combining to hit just 2-of-12 from outside the arc, fifth-seeded and 12th-ranked Oklahoma State rallied from an eight-point second-half deficit and closed the game on a 13-2 run to pull off an 83-74 win in Friday's Big 12 semifinals at the T-Mobile Center.
"There's never a good time to lose, but it's better to lose now than in the NCAA tournament," said Baylor coach Scott Drew, whose team fell to 22-2 with its second loss in seven games since returning from a COVID pause. "It's like when you put your hand on the stove and it burns you, you don't want to put your hand back on that hot stove. When you get a loss, it makes you realize, 'Hey, I don't like that feeling. I don't want this again.'''
Baylor won the two previous meetings against the Cowboys (20-7) by double-digit margins, including an 81-70 win last week in Waco. And it looked like the Bears were on a similar path when MaCio Teague and Matthew Mayer drained 3-pointers in a 10-2 run that gave them a 60-52 lead with 7:49 left in the game.
Even when Big 12 Player of the Year Cade Cunningham got on a roll and hit back-to-back 3-pointers to give Oklahoma State the lead, Baylor answered and went back on top 72-70 on Mitchell's slip-screen layup with 2 ½ minutes to go.
Drew has called Butler "the best closer in the game," but this time, it was Cunningham closing the door on the Bears.
OSU's closing run started with back-to-back and-one plays by Avery Anderson III and Rondell Walker, with Cunningham feeding Walker on a back-door cut. Cunningham hit four 3-pointers and scored 20 of his game-high 25 points in the second half, while Anderson and Walker added 20 and 11 points, respectively.
"I hope we continue to dispel that notion that we're Cade and a bunch of puppets out there," OSU coach Mike Boynton said. "He's the best player in the country, I don't think it's close. But, we've got some other really good players. I told Rondell after the game yesterday that he was going to need to be ready today, ad he answered the ball. And Avery stepped up again today as well."
The Cowboys reeled off 11 unanswered points, making 7-of-8 from the line, and limited Baylor to a second-chance layup by Mark Vital in the final seconds after five-straight misses.
"I'm anxious to look at the film to see when we had that lead with seven minutes to go, what we needed to do better to close that out," Drew said.
If Baylor had come close to its national-best 42.8 3-point shooting percentage, the Bears might have won this one going away. Instead, they made just 6-of-28 from outside the arc (21.4 percent).
The Big 12 leader and ranked sixth nationally, Butler was just 1-of-7 from 3-point range and finished with 16 points. Teague had a team-high 17 points and was 3-of-7 from distance, with Mitchell, Mayer and Adam Flagler making just 2-of-14.
"It's hard to win when you shoot that from 3," Drew said. "That's one of the toughest things about playing multi-game tournaments. When you're playing each day – three games, three days – the legs do go bad. And that's why your execution has to be at such a higher level, so your shot quality allows you to shoot a better percentage when you are fatigued."
Despite the shooting woes, Baylor's biggest struggle was probably on the defensive end, where the Bears gave up 17 fast-break points, 17 on nine offensive boards and 38 points in the paint. The 83 points were the most they allowed in regulation this season and second-most behind the 89 points by West Virginia in an overtime loss.
"It was very frustrating," said Vital, who had nine points and 15 rebounds. "We're always crashing hard, and some way, somehow, they were getting out. We don't know if a guy was leaking out. I don't know what was going on. They must have been repping it all year. It was very frustrating. That's an area we've got to improve."
While Oklahoma State faces 13th-ranked Texas (18-7) in Saturday's 5 p.m. championship game, the Bears will remain in Kansas City before heading to Indianapolis for the NCAA tournament that starts next week. The NCAA Selection Show will be broadcast by CBS at 5 p.m. Sunday.
The Longhorns advanced to the championship with a walk-over in the semifinals after Kansas had to pull out of the tournament because of a positive COVID test.
"I don't want to say it like this, but we needed that loss in a way," Vital said. "Everybody says that, but we do, because we came here with the mindset that we were already champions of the Big 12. Now that we've been thrown, we've got to go up with new energy. We've got a chip on our shoulder."