Three Reasons I’m Excited About Oklahoma State Hoops in 2019

With Oklahoma State football winding down and hoops just getting started, it’s time to take a look at what the upcoming season is going to look like. The Pokes are already 1-1 on the year after a loss at Charlotte and win against UTSA, but I’m not sure anybody (myself included!) is paying attention to GIA at this point.

There are some things I’m pumped about, though, as Mike Boynton steps into Year 2 and what could (and probably will) be the least successful of his tenure as the OSU basketball coach. Let’s dive right in.

1. Ice, Ice Maybe

When I think about pieces of a potential Big 12 title team, there aren’t a lot of names on this roster that jump out at me. Cam McGriff? Sure. Lindy Waters? Yeah, nice sixth or seventh guy. Maybe Michael Weathers or Curtis Jones or somebody else even, but there’s a lot of unknown.

One of the ones I feel most confident about being an asset for a championship-level college basketball team? Freshman Isaac Likekele — who shall heretofore be known on this website and supplemental podcast as Ice (mostly because I can’t say his name).

He’s a freshman in name only. His personality is oversized and dynamic. Every time I talk to him I think, “There’s no way I was like that as a freshman in college.”

Fran Fraschilla compared him to Tony Allen. I’m not going to go that far, but through two games he’s averaging a 10-5-5-3 line, which is indicative of what you should expect all season. On a team full of bodies that might not be Big 12 ready and games that might never develop into rotation minutes on a legit contender, Ice provides both.

His development this year will be paramount to what OSU looks like in 2019-20 when reinforcements arrive the old-fashioned way (via elite recruiting).

2. Lindy’s Stroke

I’ve been both overwhelmed and underwhelmed with Lindy Waters’ career. There are times when he looks like he should be Klay Thompson Lite. There are others when it looks like, as Mike Gundy might say, the moment is too big for him. Regardless, I think this is a huge few months for whatever he’s going to eventually become as a college basketball player.

Last year as a starter, his points per 40 minute actually went down from his freshman year. That makes sense, I suppose. He played three times as many minutes against players that were twice as good as he saw at times as a freshman. Still, he didn’t have most of the focus on him as Kendall Smith and Clip shouldered the load.

And maybe that’s why his per-40 numbers went down. Waters was used on a fewer percentage of possessions than Yankuba Sima and took a lower percentage of shots than Tavarius Shine (Waters took 16 percent of OSU’s shots when he was on the floor).

The underlying data proves that he can make a leap, though. Waters was top 10 in Big 12-only games in offensive rating, effective field goal percentage and true shooting percentage. There’s a case to be made that … he, like Tyron Johnson, was simply waiting for a bigger role in 2018-19. The stroke is undoubtedly wet — I could watch this for the rest of the week — the only question is whether he can do it as one of the guys on a Big 12 team that’s going to need all the help it can get.

3. The Future

Part of the allure of college sports (or sports in general) is a never-ending hope on the horizon. Elite recruiters can sustain 10-year contract this way. I don’t think Boynton is a bad coach — in fact, I think he’s quite good — but this year is going to test everyone’s patience a little bit.

However, unlike Gundy, Boynton has fished for and reeled in top level talent that can and will rock GIA 12 months from now. That’s fun for us as #contentcreators and fun for you as consumers of OSU hoops. Over the next year Boynton will begin to fill out a 2020 class, which will be fun on its own, and all of us will begin to think about what next year’s team with the addition of Marcus Watson (I’m weak) and the Boone Bros. to the orange and black.

Boynton has brought not just short-term hope to a program that has gasped for it for the last decade, but he’s setting it up for a sustainable run into the future that would hopefully mean it’s only going to get better and better and better from here.