It’s no secret that Utah has struggled from the free-throw line this season. In a game against Stanford, where all the Utes had to do was knock down one of four attempts, they managed to miss them all, sending the game to overtime and eventually resulting in a loss.
Sunday night’s game was a different story.
Instead of free throws being the downfall of this Utah squad, the Utes pulled through in the end to make seven free throws in the closing minutes against Oregon State and win 59-53, but it wasn’t pretty.
Shooting technical free throws, Brandon Taylor went to the stripe for the Utes, but he only made one to give the Utes a one-point lead. Kyle Kuzma then went to the line for a one-and-one, but he missed the front end, giving the ball back to the Beavers, who didn’t do anything with their possession. After some back-and-forth play, Oregon State ended up fouling Jakob Poeltl. He also only made one free throw, keeping OSU in the game.
After a missed layup by the Beavers, Utah went on to make five of its next six free throws.
The Utes, while they struggled to put the game away right after the flagrant-two foul called on OSU’s Jarmal Reid, still managed to push past the misses, something that’s been haunting the team all season long.
Head coach Larry Krystkowiak is satisfied with the 75 percent shooting from the line, and although he would like it to be around 80 or 85 percent, with another win in the books, he couldn’t ask for more.
“We made enough of them, and we made them when we needed to,” Krystkowiak said. “That’s why they call them free — you got to take advantage. A lot of people may consider a free throw a little thing, but as we’ve witnessed this year, it comes down to making a difference, especially with this many close games in our conference”.
Poeltl thinks the game against Stanford was just one slip-up and doesn’t think anything like it will happen again.
“We’re a great free throw shooting team, and we’ve proved in many games before that we can knock those down, and same thing happened today,” Poeltl said.
Krystkowiak reminded his team that its efforts must remain the same whether or not shots are falling if they want to continue trending up.
“It’s been a tough five-game stretch, and to lose the game as we did at Stanford, there’s a lot of directions we could have gone from there, and we teetered in one direction,” Krystkowiak said. “Persistence in this league is going to require some grit.”
It was apparent Krystkowiak’s message stuck with the Utes, who came out more energized in the second half. Coming up with a few stops and seeing a few shots go in the net, the team was riding a high when it got within four points. OSU eventually made another run to create more distance.
However, seeing the shots go in was all Utah needed to get rolling to tie the game up at 50 points.
In the Utes’ last win against Colorado, Krystkowiak thought he and his team did not do a good job of managing their emotions. This carried over and was the reason they eventually took a beating and lost to Oregon last Thursday night. While the Utes will use this game to propel themselves against the Washington schools this next weekend, they will need their defense to follow suit if they get off to another sluggish start.
What’s been a staple of this Utah program for so many years has been lacking this season. When the shots aren’t falling, the Utes are going to need to play twice as hard on the other end of the court.
“We got to be a lot better in order to accomplish our goals,” Krystkowiak said. “We got to be a lot tighter in our game plan.”
@kbrenneisen