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WICHITA, Kan. – Kelvin Sampson didn’t get to this point in his career missing the little things. So at Saturday’s shootaround before Houston‘s NCAA Tournament second-round game vs. Gonzaga, he pulled aside assistant coach Hollis Price with a request bordering on a demand.
“Hollis,” Price recalls his boss telling him, “L.J.’s been struggling the second half. Make sure he gets up as many shots as possible.”
Wait, what? Leading scorer LJ Cryer is the stone-faced leading scorer for this No. 1 seed who already has five – count ’em five – championship rings stowed away at his home in Katy, Texas. Officially the LJ stands for Lionel Jr. But based on his career it could be “Long-range Jumper.”
Besides that, how many shots do you need after taking a million?
“Best shooting guard in the country,” teammate Milos Uzan crowed about his backcourt mate.
“When I was little I used to shoot until my arms got tired,” Cryer said. “When I got to college I did the same thing.”
Those are not clap backs. They, ultimately, may be part of a prelude to a championship. Top-seeded Houston certainly inched closer to a national title it has never owned with an 81-76 win over No. 8 seed Gonzaga to advance to the Sweet 16 for the sixth consecutive time in Sampson’s run with the Houston.
Sampson never would have done it without the buttery-smooth Cryer who tied a career high with 30 points, 14 of them in the final nine minutes when Gonzaga became Gonzaga again. The underseeded (No. 8) Zags cut a 12-point lead with 6 ½ minutes to go to one point with 21 seconds to go. Cryer then provided two free throws to cut the lead to 79-76. That still didn’t quite put it out of reach.
Sweet relief didn’t come until Gonzaga’s Khalif Battle tried a corner 3-pointer to tie it, but the shot was blocked by Houston’s Ja’Vier Francis with two seconds left.
“We gave up a lot but we were able to find a way,” Francis said.
The Cougars had seldom been pushed like this the entire season. It was the most points Houston had given up since its last loss, an 82-81 defeat on Feb. 1 at home against Texas Tech. It has now won 15 in a row, the last six this month by almost 11 points per game before Saturday.
“We’ve been on the wrong side of things when things like this happen,” Cryer said of the close second half.
Well, yes, if you count a 5-3 start to the season. Since then, the Cougars have gone 26-1 with Cryer leading the way.
“This is no shocker to me,” Uzan said. “This is really what he does.”
The contest lived up to the hype of being an Elite Eight or Final Four-type showdown. Gonzaga’s run of nine straight Sweet 16s ended after an epic effort. (Houston now leads the nation in that category.) Zags big Graham Ike scored 27 and at 6-foot-9, looked like he could transition to the NBA right now.
“Nobody’s doing that. No one,” Gonzaga coach Mark Few said of Ike’s performance. “You’re facing double teams every time. There’s double teams and then there’s Houston double-teams. For him to do that is unbelievable.”
But in the end, a conference held together by football expansion after the loss of Texas and Oklahoma now has three teams in the Sweet 16 and counting. And, if you’re counting, that gives the Big 12 a 9-1 record in the tournament.
Houston will be accompanied by BYU and Texas Tech into the Sweet 16 with Sunday’s second-round games still to play.
And none of that happens for Houston without Cryer. The Baylor transfer has won two conference championship rings each with the Bears and the Cougars. There is also a national championship ring as a reserve with Baylor in 2021. Next month Cryer could become what is believed to be the first Division I player to win national championships at two different schools.
If bigger things await, Cryer is going to carry the Cougars instead of watching mostly from the bench. The third-team All-American is averaging 19 points this month.
“I feel like this year I’ve been having a lot of great first halves and then in the second half I slow down a little bit …,” Cryer said. “I felt like coach knew I was going to have to have a big second-half … We changed my warm-up in the second half, got up a lot of shots.”
About that halftime routine. Cryer warmed up a bit like Steph Curry. OK, that might be an exaggeration but not much of one.
The Houston guard put on a dazzling display if you paid attention closely enough. He made feathery 3-pointer after feathery 3-pointer after being fed by Price. Behind the back, crossover dribbles that would make a magician arch an eyebrow.
Curry’s warmup routine before games is legendary, starting with impossible corner 3-pointers and ending with an array of halfcourt games. Sometimes that’s the best thing that happens in the NBA that night.
No, we’re not going anywhere near comparing Houston’s leading scorer to an NBA all-timer but at this point in Houston’s season the number of comparisons runneth over. In coach Kelvin Sampson’s 36th year of coaching college ball, in his 20th trip to the NCAA Tournament, the man has the Cougars within two games of another Final Four.
Sampson calls Cryer the team’s “security blanket.” That’s what it looks like when Houston’s bigs pitch out of a scramble underneath to Cryer at the perimeter. Eighteen of his points came on six 3-pointers. For the 36th time in his career Cryer scored at least 20 points
“He was spectacular,” Few said. “We set out to limit his 3s and make him take tough twos .. Other than that, we defended him the way we wanted to defend him and he still hit those shots.”
We cannot leave Wichita without being reminded that Gonzaga’s desperation 3-pointer to tie it came from the hands of Battle who is a tournament story to be remembered. At his fourth school in six years, the 6-9 guard came from his native Newark, New Jersey, where his friend Xan Korman was shot and killed years ago.
“I felt like it was time for a change(for) my last year,” Battle explained in changing his number from 0 to 99. Why 99? There are nine letters in Korman’s name and he was born in the ninth month (September).
Battle texted Korman’s parents Thursday night to remind them why he is playing at all.
“I’ll keep dancing in his honor, for sure,” Battle said before the game.
“I wish I could have had that one back,” he said of the last shot after it.
