What Does the Success in Brooklyn Mean for Cowboys?
Oklahoma State joined the world of the ranked basketball teams on Monday. Following an ultra successful trip to Brooklyn, Mike Boynton’s old stomping grounds where he grew up, the Cowboys put a couple of good trophies on the wall with an 86-72 win over Syracuse and 78-37 over Ole Miss to win the NIT Season Tip-Off, the USA Today Coaches Poll has the Cowboys at No. 25.
The Associated Press gave the Cowboys votes but only enough to have them at 30 if the poll were extended. That’s okay because Boynton and his old guard of four seniors, and the young guard of freshmen with a pair of starting sophomores as the in-between, don’t need all that much that could go to their heads.
This bunch that has Georgetown, Wichita State, Houston on the road, and Minnesota in Tulsa as their next four games needs to stay hungry. They don’t need to feel like they have made it. I know the words to New York, New York. “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere …” That isn’t what the trip to Brooklyn meant.
“I hope it means that our kids continue to believe what our coaches are telling them,” head coach Mike Boynton said of the 7-0 start and the two dominating wins in the Barclays Center. “I told them after the game that the only thing that matters moving forward is that we don’t change, that we continue to work the same way, and that we continue to believe in each other. It is one of those unique things that I have been around is this group of kids that truly enjoy each other’s success. You try to preach that stuff, but these are 18, 19, 20-year-olds and some of them are freshman that came in thinking they were going to be a bigger part of this from a production standpoint and how that plays out early in their career usually determines how that career goes. What they hear back home. We’ve had some of them play some and some of them play more. Some of them have been inconsistent in production and playing time, but none of them have shown a bad attitude. They have all been happy for whoever is having the success because they all know it is about our team winning.”
Point guard Isaac Likekele was a star in Brooklyn, scoring 26 points to lead the way in the first game and then distributing the ball and being more the glue in the Ole Miss win. His constant was intimidating defense in both games.
“Really, it doesn’t feel like anything honestly, if you ask me,” Likekele said. “You know we’re 7-0 and everything but there are no rewards for it. You know we still haven’t got to conference play and when you get to that it is 0-0. S o, right now we’re just taking it one game at a time and focusing on Wednesday night and focus on this 40 minutes. We can’t get ahead of ourselves and we have to be down for that night and that night only.”
Maybe the guy on this team, and one of those guys that hasn’t played as much in graduate transfer Jonathan Laurent is best to make a determination of where this team is and where it could be going. Laurent has seen a lot of basketball having played at both Rutgers in the Big 10 and UMass in the A-10 Conference. Where does he see this team heading and how is he feeling about now and his decision to come to Stillwater.
“I get a good feeling,” Laurent answered. “We have a lot of hard workers. We’ve had a lot of practices and I would say we have maybe had two bad practices. That is pretty incredible coming from what I’ve seen and the programs that I’ve been in. It is hard to string a lot of good practices together and we’ve got guys that are hard workers and work in and out of practice, guys coming in early, guys staying late, and guys getting shots up after practice. I feel we could be a really special crew. We just need to keep on fighting and doing what we are doing right now.”
Not necessarily an unbiased opinion, but certainly an educated one. I think the attitude of staying hungry will help.
