Cold shooting dooms Baylor in loss to Kansas at Big 12 tournament

When Baylor went into the locker room at halftime of its Big 12 tournament semifinal game, Bears coach Scott Drew felt fortunate to only be down eight points.

His team had turned the ball over 10 times. They had missed 20 of their 25 shots, including nine of their 10 three-point tries.

But that was just the start of an uncharacteristic offensive night for the Bears, who lost 62-52 to top-seeded Kansas on Friday at the Sprint Center and set a season first in the process.

Entering the game, Baylor had accomplished something that only No. 1 Kentucky could match: The Bears had led every one of their games this season by at least six points.

Against Kansas, Baylor only led by two points for a brief period in the first half; they didn’t get close to tying the score in the second half despite improving their shooting a bit from that woeful 20 percent in the first half to 42.4 percent in the second and 32.8 percent for the game.

“If we would have made half of our shots that we took, we would have ended up winning the game,” Drew said. “If we weren’t stuck on 35 or 36 for what seemed like an eternity in the second half, we would have had a chance down the stretch.”

For the record, Baylor was stuck on those point totals from 11 minutes, 12 seconds left in the second half, when Kenny Chery hit a three-pointer that cut KU’s lead to 39-35, until Jonathan Motley hit a layup with 4:19 remaining that made it 51-38 KU.

Chery was the only consistent shooter for the Bears, making seven of 14 from the field, including four of seven threes.

Without Chery, Baylor was zero for 15 from behind the arc against Kansas’ defense, which made it a point to challenge the Bears’ shooters at the three-point line. KU scored 15 points off 17 Baylor turnovers but also turned the ball over 18 times itself, giving up 16 points to the Bears.

“They’re a good defensive team and we executed what we should have executed,” Chery said. “We had some careless turnovers.”

Kansas also took away Baylor’s second-chance opportunities by winning the rebounding battle for the first time in the teams’ three games this season. The Bears had out-rebounded opponents in 27 of 32 games entering Friday.

Add a bunch of turnovers to a rebounding deficit, and that compounds the problem.

“You got to be able to defend and rebound and give yourself a chance to be successful,” Drew said. “That’s why turnovers are so tough, because when you turn over, they get an easy (chance) on the other end. … And the second thing is then you don’t give yourself a chance to offensive rebound, which we do so well.”

This story was originally published March 13, 2015 at 10:55 PM with the headline "Cold shooting dooms Baylor in loss to Kansas at Big 12 tournament."