Hogs drop another on road

NORMAN, Okla. — Arkansas is still winless away from Bud Walton Arena.

Oklahoma held the Razorbacks to 35 percent shooting and Sooners guard Steven Pledger scored 22 points in a 78-63 win at the Lloyd Noble Center on Saturday afternoon.

The Hogs (5-3) couldn’t overcome cold first-half shooting and a 12-point halftime deficit, losing their second consecutive road game and falling to 0-3 outside Bud Walton this season.

“Obviously not one of our best performances and probably one of our worst from a shooting standpoint,” Arkansas coach Mike Anderson said. “Let’s give Oklahoma a little credit from that part of it … but still, yet, I just thought we showed some tendencies of a young basketball team and that means getting rattled.

“(We) kind of get rattled pretty easily.”

The Sooners (7-1) hurt Arkansas inside in the first half, outside in the second.

Junior forward Andrew Fitzgerald scored all 17 of his points and grabbed seven of his eight rebounds in the first half on his 21st birthday.

“My man was in a groove for his birthday,” Pledger said.

Fitzgerald had to go to the bench after picking up his fourth foul early in the second and played just 6 minutes after halftime. Pledger stepped up and scored 19 of his 22 in the second half, though.

“That was really tough because we came in at halftime and talked about stopping the inside game,” Arkansas sophomore guard Mardracus Wade said. “Then we get out there and Pledger goes off on the outside.”

The Razorbacks shot just 25 percent in the first half, digging a hole too deep to climb out of in the second.

“I maybe didn’t have the right combination,” Anderson said. “You’ve got to put the ball in the hole on the road … We just didn’t put the ball in the hole when we needed to.”

Arkansas freshman guard B.J. Young scored a game-high 24 points and made 9 of 16 shots, but didn’t get much help from his teammates. The rest of the team combined to shoot just 26 percent from the floor.

“We’ve got to get some other guys to really start stepping up,” Anderson said. “I thought every time I looked to bring somebody in off the bench to give us a lift, we just couldn’t find those people to give us a lift.”

OU controlled the first half, but the Razorbacks cut their deficit to 37-25 at halftime when Young took an inbounds pass in the backcourt with 4.9 seconds left and raced down the court, hitting a runner as time expired.

The Hogs started the second half hot and used a 12-4 run, including Young’s basket to end the first half, to cut the Sooners’ lead to 41-35.

“That stretch at the end of the first half and maybe even then to start the second, we lost focus a bit,” OU coach Lon Kruger said.

That was the closest Arkansas would get, though.

OU responded with a 13-3 spurt, though, knocking down three 3-pointers in the stretch and pushing the lead back to double digits while the Hogs struggled to score.

“I think we need a leader on the team that’s like, ‘Hold on, we’ve got run offense, get something easy. We don’t have to come down and jack it up,’” Wade said. “I think that’s one of our biggest problems right now is that we don’t have that leader on the team. That person that can calm us down and un-rattle us.”

The Razorbacks couldn’t get closer than 12 the rest of the game. The Sooners shot 60 percent from the field in the second half and led by as many as 18 points down the stretch.

“They can get on a big run with that press if they get it going and cranking it up pretty good,” Kruger said. “We avoided that.”

OU maintained its lead in the second half despite Fitzgerald spending much of the half on the bench after picking up his fourth foul with 14:20 left.

“It just seemed like we never could get that lead down to a number that we could work with,” Anderson said.

Pledger and sophomore forward Tyler Neal picked up the slack offensively with Fitzgerald in foul trouble. Neal scored 18 points and hit four 3-pointers.

The Sooners knocked down 8 of 16 from 3-point range in the game.

“Shooting the ball well cures a lot of problems,” Kruger said.

Shooting was the problem for Arkansas.

The Hogs struggled to get in a rhythm offensively, shooting just 25 percent and committing nine turnovers.

“Early on I thought we didn’t do a good job taking care of the basketball,” Anderson said. “In the first half, I think we had maybe eight or nine turnovers unforced. I thought we just didn’t make the extra pass.”

OU used a 22-3 run to build a 15-point first-half lead. The Razorbacks missed their first eight shots and didn’t make a field goal until Hunter Mickelson’s putback more than 6 minutes into the game.

“Those guys make runs and we’ll come back down and jack up a shot,” Wade said. “We’ll do something crazy. We’ll turn the ball over. I think that we need to be more patient. When those guys make runs, we’ve just got to chip away, make stops, take the easy bucket.”

The Hogs made just one of their first 15 field-goal attempts, while the Sooners made nine of their first 11 shots.

Fitzgerald had 15 points in the first 10 minutes, scoring on an array of low-post moves and mid-range jumpers.

“Fitzgerald did a good job in the first half of establishing his dominance inside,” Anderson said. “It just seemed like we had no answer for them.”