Oklahoma State Has Good Depth With the Forwards and Bigs Going Into the Season

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KANSAS CITY, MO – Oklahoma State made its annual appearance at Big 12 Basketball Media Days this week, but with a little bit of a different look. Instead of one day for the men and women’s teams, the conference did a group event over Tuesday and Wednesday, with half the teams going on each day. 

The Cowboys and Cowgirls were on Wednesday, and we’ve got plenty of exclusive content we’ll be putting out over the next several days. 

Steve Lutz sat down with us just before our radio show, The Afternoon Sports Drive at 3 p.m. on the Triple Play Sports Radio and gave us 20 minutes. We discussed a number of topics, including the preseason exhibitions, some of the transfers and newcomers and what it means to get Parsa Fallah back from injury and eligibility (for now) for both him and Kashie Natt.

This first article will be about how he feels about his bigs.

“I think we certainly have a lot of depth and versatility there between the forwards and the centers and I’m excited about it because I’ve always believed in playing through the post,” Steve Lutz said. “Every good basketball team typically has a good post presence and any time you can throw the ball down on the block and shoot it two to five feet, you’re obviously increasing your chances of scoring the basketball. I’m excited about those guys, collectively we have a lot of talent on paper, now we’ve just got to get them to play well together and do it for sustained periods of time.

“We were very cognizant of what we were doing in terms of spending our money and we knew that we had to hold onto a decent amount of money for a big guy,” Steve Lutz said. “Once we got Julius then we were kind of next best available player. Obviously, with [Jordan Burks] having averaged five rebounds and 13 or 14 points in the league, he’s proven he can do it. He got his team to the NCAA tournament and at the end of the day that’s obviously our quest. We’ve got to get to the NCAA tournament this year and figure out a way to win games.

“The thing about Julius [Halaifonua] is he’s skilled. I think that’s the thing people didn’t understand about Parsa when we recruited him, I thought this guy could do a lot of different things. Whether he was able to showcase those things at his previous schools it didn’t matter. In the evaluation of him, we felt like there was a lot more and Julius is the same way. I mean his was arguably Georgetown’s best player as they year finished up and his ceiling is very, very high. He’s shown that he can stretch the defense with 3-point shooting, he’s shown he can score on the block, now we just need him to do it consistently at a high, high level.”