Baylor
10-6
Oklahoma State
8-9
McClure Leads MBB to Win at Oklahoma State
1/14/2019 10:20:00 PM | Men's Basketball
Senior guard scored a career-high 29 points.
STILLWATER, Okla. – Baylor came into Monday's game as the worst 3-point shooting team in the Big 12 and ranked 335th nationally out of 351 Division I teams, hitting just 29.2 percent from outside the arc.
No more.
Led by King McClure's career-high 29 points and seven 3-pointers, the Bears (10-6, 2-2) shot a sizzling 60 percent from deep (15-of-25) and pulled out a huge 73-69 road win over the Oklahoma State Cowboys (8-9, 2-3) at Gallagher-Iba Arena.
Playing its second game without 6-9 sophomore center Tristan Clark, who will miss the rest of the season with a knee injury, Baylor continued its recent dominance of Oklahoma State. The Bears have won seven in a row in the series overall, four straight in Stillwater and six of their last eight trips intoGallagher-Iba Arena.
"It's always good to win on the road against any Big 12 team," said McClure, who topped his previous high of 27 that he had in a game two months ago against George Mason. "You have to protect your house, but any win you can get on the road against a stacked Big 12 is huge. It's huge for our confidence. Especially after hearing that we lost Tristan, that's a big win for us."
Baylor coach Scott Drew said the Bears have "been blessed" in Stillwater, where they had dropped 24 of their first 27 games until this latest eight-game stretch.
"Don't jinx it, because you know how hard it is to win anywhere on the road in the Big 12 with the great crowd support you get and how hard people play," he said. "I thought there were several times that their crowd really got behind them, and we could have been rattled. And I thought we did a great job keeping our composure. It takes a team to win, and you had so many different guys stepping up tonight."
None bigger than McClure, who hit six of his first seven shots from outside the arc and scored 20 of his game-high 29 points in the first half. He had scored 17 points combined and gone 1-for-9 from 3-point range in the previous three Big 12 games and hadn't scored in double digits since the Dec. 1 game at Wichita State.
"King McClure, obviously, had a special game for us," Drew said. "As a coach, you love when your seniors get to have a chance to – he had been struggling and spending a lot of time in the gym – and you love it when their hard work pays off."
It wasn't just the King Show. Freshman guard Jared Butler was 4-of-7 from 3-point range and chipped in with 16 points and four assists; Makai Mason hit a clutch jumper and two free throws in the last 10 seconds and finished with 13 points; and Mark Vital had a game-high 13 rebounds to help Baylor edge the Cowboys on the boards, 36-35.
Baylor (15) and Oklahoma State (13) both hit season highs for 3-pointers, combining to knock down a mind-boggling 28-of-54 (51.9 percent) in a stunning shootout. The Bears' previous high was 11 treys against Prairie View A&M back on Nov. 12.
With both teams coming off emotional games – the Bears' 73-68 loss at home to No. 7 Kansas and the Cowboys' 85-77 road win at West Virginia – "normally, nobody can make any buckets," Drew said.
"Today, I don't know if anyone could miss for a while," he said. "It didn't matter what defense you were in, it was an offensive display by both teams. We had a little bit more down the stretch to come away with the win."
After trailing by five at the break, 40-35, Oklahoma State hit six of its first eight shots from 3-point range to open the second half on a 21-10 run and went up 56-50 on a 3-pointer by Curtis Jones at the 12:57 mark.
But, the Cowboys went cold against Baylor's zone defense, missing 13 of their last 16 shots.
Sandwiched around a 3-pointer by Mason, reserve forward Freddie Gillespie drained four straight free throws to give the Bears a 61-60 lead with 7:12 left in the game.
After Cameron McGriff tied it with a free throw, McClure came out of a second-half slumber and buried the go-ahead trey off an assist from Butler. He had scored just four points after the break before draining the clutch 3-pointer and then adding a pair of free throws in the closing minute.
"They tried to take away the 3, so I drove a couple times and got to the free throw line," McClure said. "They made it a little harder to get my catch-and-shoot going. I had to put it on the floor more. But, that's what good teams do, they adjust."
Mason took over in the closing seconds. After Michael Weathers missed both free throws when Mason was called for a questionable foul, the grad transfer from Yale hit a clutch jumper from just outside the lane and then buried the clinching free throws after a McGriff 3-pointer.
McClure, whose previous high for 3-pointers made was five, credited his teammates for finding "me when I got hot."
"It's amazing what you can do when you've got a group of guys behind you cheering you on and excited for your success," he said. "They were looking for me, for real. They know I'd do the same thing for them. If one of them was hot, they know I'm going to get the ball and I'm going to look for them."
Jones hit four of OSU's 13 3-pointers and finished with a team-high 18 points, with McGriff recording his second straight and sixth double-double of the season with 15 points and 10 boards.
Baylor returns home to host league-leading and eighth-ranked Texas Tech (15-1, 4-0) at 5 p.m. Saturday at the Ferrell Center. The Red Raiders are coming off a 68-62 road win at Texas.
