The Cats lost by 16. It felt worse than that.
On February 1 K-State—a team which had not won a road game in forever—somehow blew out then-No. 3 Iowa State—a team which had not lost at home in forever—by an 80-61 score. Whatever magic K-State took to Ames that night was lacking on Senior Day in Manhattan as the Cyclones (22-8, 13-7 Big 12) crushed K-State (15-16, 9-11) 73-57.
The 16-point margin does not seem to capture the gulf between the two squads on this day that made fans wonder how the Wildcats ever managed to score 80 points anywhere.
The Wildcats were simply abysmal on offense. They struggled to get the ball inside, and they made only 2 of the 21 three-point attempts they opted to launch. If you’re into depressing math, that’s 9.5% shooting. (If you’re not into depressing math, its still 9.5% shooting).
The lone exception was (super) senior David N’Guessan, who led K-State with 19 points on 8-10 shooting accuracy. Mobi Ikegwuruka was the only other Cat to shoot 50%, as he was 2-4 in 11 minutes of action.
Nobody else on the roster shot better than 33% from the floor. Excluding N’Guessan and Ikegwuruka, the squad was 10-39, or 25.6%.
Add to the scoring woes a 22-6 deficit in points off turnovers, a 28-9 deficit in bench scoring, and a 21-6 deficit in outside scoring, and its remarkable the game was ever within K-State’s reach.
The Wildcats trailed by 8 at halftime and managed to cut the gap to 40-34 with over 15 minutes remaining. But the Cats did not score for a stretch of 4:20, allowing the Cyclones to forge an 11-0 run and build a 51-34 advantage under 11:30 to play.
Iowa State rode a double-digit lead the rest of the way.
The game saw four technical fouls called—one on Iowa State’s Nate Heise for excessively arrogant lip-wagging, one on N’Guessan for slapping the sideline table after a call, and a pointless double-technical on Dug McDaniel and Iowa State’s Curtis Jones for jawing when the game was out of reach. Each of those technicals probably said more about the tenderness of the officials than the misconduct players.
McDaniel made 7-8 free throws to augment his 3-11 field day into 14 points to be second-high scorer for K-State.
Three Cyclones reached double-digits. Curtis Jones led them with 24. Like McDaniel, he was poor from the floor (5-15) but lit the lamp at the charity stripe at an 11-12 clip.
NEXT GAME
K-State landed the 10th seed in the Big 12 Tournament and will play 15th-seeded Arizona State at 6:00 Tuesday evening. The Cats beat the Sun Devils 71-70 in Tempe, but lost to them, 66-54, in Bramlage on February 23.