BATON ROUGE — LSU men’s basketball coach John Brady is hopeful that a week away from competition and a good week of practice will add up to another good performance at home Saturday as the Tigers host the Arkansas Razorbacks at 7 p.m. in the Maravich Assembly Center.
There is no television for the contest and tickets will be available through mid-day Saturday on the Internet at www.LSUsports.net.
Tickets will go on sale at the upper level box office of the Maravich Assembly Center, beginning at 5:30 p.m. The game will be broadcast on radio on the LSU Sports Network (Eagle 98.1 FM) and on the Internet at the LSU site as well.
“We’ve had the week off and it hit us at a good time,” said LSU’s Brady. “We’ve got five games left with three of them at home. We’ll have to see if we can play well Saturday against Arkansas, who I thought played extremely well (Wednesday night at home versus Kentucky).”
The Tigers are 2-2 over the last four games, having won their last two games with losses on a last-second shot at Auburn and an 11-point loss at Kentucky in their last start, a game in which the Tigers were 20 down but cut the Wildcat lead to just five with less than a minute to play.
During that time the Tigers have settled into a lineup with Xavier Whipple at the point and long-time point guard Torris Bright now on a wing. Collis Temple III completes the three-guard lineup, with Jaime Lloreda and Ronald Dupree at the two forward spots. Dupree is in the top seven in scoring in the league at 15.7 points per game and Lloreda’s 8.6 rebound average is second overall in the league with Dupree’s seven-plus average third.
Dupree and Lloreda were both named to the District 8 team as chosen by the National Association of Basketball Coaches earlier this week with Dupree making the first team for the second straight year with Lloreda on the second team.
“We just needed to change and do something different,’ said Brady. “Antonio Hudson hasn’t played as well as we would have liked and he’s concerned about it, too. ‘We’ve moved Torris Bright off the ball. We’ve played pretty well the last five games with that. We lost to Auburn on a buzzer-beater and we played Kentucky really well. We’re comfortable with that, we we’ll just proceed with that lineup.”
Arkansas enters off a four-game losing streak at Mississippi State, to Tennessee, at South Carolina and Wednesday night, 66-50, to Kentucky.
Arkansas is 7-15 and 2-9 overall. In the first meeting at Fayetteville on Jan. 22, Arkansas dominated the board and got solid performances from key players in a 73-65 win. That win snapped a five-game losing streak for the Tigers.
When you’re fighting to get a win, Kentucky is not a team to play,” said first-year Coach Stan Heath. “We’ll just have to focus on LSU. I know they’ll be ready. We’ve got to get our minds right again because it’s going to be a tough environment to play in.”
LSU next plays Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Assembly Center against Auburn.