BATON ROUGE — The LSU men’s basketball team put seven players in double figures in an easy 94-61 exhibition win over the MBK Odessa team from the Ukraine Friday night at the Maravich Assembly Center.
LSU wins both of its exhibition contents this week and can now concentrate on its Saturday, Nov. 20, opener at the Assembly Center against Grambling State.
The Tigers jumped out to a 41-28 halftime lead in a somewhat sloppy 20 minutes and then really went to work on the visitors in the second half, outscoring the Odessa squad, 0-5 against college teams going into a game Saturday at Ole Miss, 55-33.
Stromile Swift led the scoring parade with 16 points, with Ronald Dupree getting 15, Brian Beshara had 14 points (and led the team in rebounds with 11). Jabari Smith scored 12 points, Torris Bright had 11 and Brad Bridgewater and Jermaine Williams each had 10 points.
With off-guard Lamont Roland on the bench with his sprained ankle and set to miss at least the first two weeks of the season, Bright, Williams and Collis Temple rotated the guard positions. Bright finished with eight assists and just three turnovers in 33 minutes of play, while Williams had an assist and one turnover in 30 minutes and Temple two assists and three turnovers in 18 minutes.
“It looked to me as a coach that our team was out there doing things we had not practiced,” said Coach John Brady of the first half. “For about 15 minutes I didn’t see our practice being displayed in the game. The last five or six minutes, we stopped them and we tried to play like we practice. Outside of trying to win the game in the first five or six minutes, I felt like we settled down and started to play our style of basketball.”