Longtime teammates reunited on opposite sides of Bedlam
NORMAN — Only a couple of men anywhere have spent as much time on a basketball court with Trae Young as Oklahoma State guard Lindy Waters III has.
Teammates since elementary school, Waters and Young, the Oklahoma freshman star, will be competing on the same court for the first time since their Norman North High School team lost in the Class 6A state finals in 2016 when No. 7 OU hosts OSU in the first Bedlam showdown of the season at Lloyd Noble Center.
While Young’s impact is easy to measure in statistics — he leads the nation in scoring (29.6) and assists (10.7) per game through his first 12 career games — Waters’ effect is gauged differently.
The 6-foot-6 guard doesn’t lead the 10-3 Cowboys in points, rebounds, assists or blocks.
Yet one key statistic represents his value to his team: Waters had played 336 minutes through 13 games, more than any other Cowboy.
“He’s a guy who can do a lot of things,” OSU coach Mike Boynton said. “He’s a really good ball-handler. He’s a guy who can pass exceptionally well. He can guard multiple positions.
“So he gives us a sense of versatility in our lineups that we can play different ways. We can go big with him at the point guard. We can play smaller with him as a power forward, and still be able to play pretty seamlessly.”
Waters had 13 points, five rebounds and a season-high four steals against West Virginia Friday, and the Cowboys will need him to fill a variety of columns on the stat sheet Wednesday.
While OSU point guard Kendall Smith is the likely first option in guarding Young, it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that Waters, who wasn’t available to the media this week, ends up on Young at some point.
“It’s going to be fun,” Young said. “I’ve played with Lindy since I was a kid, second, third grade. He’s a really talented player. It’s going to be fun — a lot of things that I know about him, he knows about me, so it’s going to be fun.
“I feel like I’ve gotten a little bit better since the last time I’ve seen him, but he has as well. There’s going to be things he knows about me but there’s also going to be things that he doesn’t. It’s not just me that he’s playing against (Wednesday), we’ve got a pretty talented group of guys around me, too.”
Waters and Young were teammates nearly every year from elementary school through their three seasons together at Norman North. Their fathers coached AAU together when the players were younger.
So Waters has a unique level of familiarity with Young, about whom national media is raving since he burst onto the scene in November.
Boynton has gotten to know Young as well.
“We’ve been pretty dialed in on watching film,” Boynton said of the OSU coaching staff.
“I’ve got great familiarity with the kid, having recruited him a little bit last year.
“He’s having as good a season as any college basketball player I’ve seen in a long time, so hats off to him, but this will be a game between two schools that don’t really like each other too much and look forward to competing.”