Texas Basketball: 3 struggling players that must step up in February

Marcus Carr, G

The last two games weren’t the best for senior guard Marcus Carr. If you combine the loss to the No. 4 Tennessee Volunteers on the road in the SEC/Big 12 Challenge on Jan. 28 and the win over Baylor on Jan. 30, Carr managed just 16 points.

That is only the second time this season that Carr combined for fewer than 20 points in a two-game stretch.

For that reason, I don’t believe that Carr will be down for long. He is too good at scoring at a high capacity and in a multitude of different ways for him to keep having scoring nights in the single digits or even the low teens.

It’s also worth noting that I don’t really fault Carr for not having his best outing against the Vols. Tennessee is the No. 1 rated team in adjusted defensive efficiency, according to Kenpom.

The Baylor game was a little bit of a different story, though. A combination of poor shot selection, a lack of off-ball movement on the offensive end from his teammates, and him just having an off shooting night from the field resulted in a bad outing for Carr in terms of his shooting efficiency against Baylor. Carr took too off-balance two-pointers against Baylor and he even air-balled a three-pointer.

Those are the types of shots we occasionally saw from Carr last season. He had mostly eliminated those poor shot attempts from the field this season, at least up until the Baylor game.

Carr needs to slow the game down again and have the awareness to either pass the ball off or work the ball to a higher percentage area on the floor before putting it up.

It was good to see Carr come through when it mattered in the win over Baylor. Carr nailed the mid-range two-pointer that essentially put the win on ice for Texas against the Bears earlier this week.

Nonetheless, it is still obvious that Texas needs Carr to be at his best if this team wants to contend in the Big 12. Despite the last two games where Carr was down, he still leads the team in box plus/minus (9.0), player efficiency rating (21.9), and win shares (3.6).

And on the more positive end of things, Carr has really cut down on the turnovers and has remained very disruptive with his perimeter defense. In the last four games, Carr is averaging around 2.5 steals per game. And he turned the ball over just twice while racking up four assists, in the last two games.

In the next two games against the Kansas schools, I expect to see big bounce-back performances from Carr. He put up a whopping 27 points, six rebounds, and six assists on 59 percent shooting from the field against Kansas State roughly one month ago. And while he did struggle in two outings against the Jayhawks last season, he should be able to get going against a team that is allowing nearly 73 points per game and 36 percent shooting from deep in Big 12 play.