Kansas State falls apart late in road loss against hot-shooting TCU
It didn’t seem to matter when or where TCU shot the ball against Kansas State on Saturday at Schollmaier Arena. As long as the Horned Frogs were behind the three-point line, good things usually happened.
TCU defeated K-State 68-57 behind an impressive display of outside shooting that the Wildcats weren’t able to match.
The Horned Frogs made 15 three-pointers on 33 attempts and eventually pulled away from the Wildcats in a game that was a back-and-forth battle in most other areas. Some of that was due to poor defense from Bruce Weber’s team, which regularly left TCU shooters open on the perimeter, and some of it was players like Desmond Bane and Jaire Grayer showing off their natural talents.
They made many big shots in this game, but the biggest occurred with 4 minutes, 49 seconds remaining when Grayer beat the shot clock with a corner three that gave TCU a 60-52 lead. The Wildcats were unable to mount a late comeback from there and ended up losing by double digits.
Francisco Farabello appropriately removed all doubt on which team was going to win by later hitting a deep three that gave TCU a 66-53 advantage in the final minutes.
“I thought our guys competed,” K-State coach Bruce Weber said. “They played hard. We won a lot of categories — points off turnovers, we turned them over, points in the paint, fastrbeak points, bench points — but the difference was obviously their 15 threes. That really hurt us.”
With the loss, K-State (9-16, 2-10 Big 12) is now all alone in last place of the Big 12 standings. It has lost five straight games. TCU (14-11, 5-7) kept its postseason hopes alive with an important victory that ended a six-game losing streak.
This was a pivotal game for both teams, as the Wildcats and Frogs have been struggling on the court of late.
“There are going to be days when you make more threes than others,” TCU coach Jamie Dixon said. “Today was one of those days. But we had a lot of good looks. The shot selection was good.”
K-State will try to bounce back in its next game at Texas Tech on Wednesday. TCU will head to Texas on that same day.
K-State guard David Sloan is hopeful the Wildcats can play well next week. He thought they played with ideal effort against the Horned Frogs, execution was simply lacking. They were particularly poor from three-point range, as they only made 2 shots on 12 attempts.
“We see that we are in every game,” Sloan said after scoring 11 points. “We just have to get better shots and cut down on turnovers.”
This was a game the Wildcats had a chance to win. They ended the first half on a 13-2 run and took a 27-26 lead into the locker room. Then they went toe-to-toe with the Frogs for much of the second half behind the inspired play of Xavier Sneed, who led K-State with 15 points.
The Wildcats led 52-51 with 6:47 remaining in the game.
But it wasn’t enough. Not with Bane draining heat-check shots from well behind the arc on his way to 17 points and R.J. Nembhard and Grayer both scoring 15.
The Horned Frogs ended the game on a 17-5 run.
“We aren’t playing well enough to win right now,” Weber said.
They didn’t make shots. The Horned Frogs did. It doesn’t take much more than that to explain what decided this game.
This story was originally published February 15, 2020 at 6:23 PM with the headline "Kansas State falls apart late in road loss against hot-shooting TCU."