BATON ROUGE — The LSU men’s basketball team will try to put the fundamentals together and introduce the fans to a new group of players Thursday night in the 7 p.m. exhibition opener with college all-star team, Global Sports.
Tickets for the game at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center are $5 each and will be available during the day Thursday at the LSU Athletic Ticket Office and beginning at the upper ticket windows of the Maravich Center beginning at 5:30 p.m. LSU students with valid ID are admitted free.
The Tigers return starters Jaime Lloreda and Xavier Whipple from the end of last year’s season and have veterans Antonio Hudson and Darrel Mitchell who will also play key roles in this season’s play. But beyond that is a talented recruiting class ranked as high as No. 1 in the country by some publications that will get their first taste of the college game Thursday.
Brandon Bass, from Capital High School in Baton Rouge, is a possible starter for the contest as he continues to adapt to head coach John Brady‘s style of play. The other first year players are Regis Koundjia, Darnell Lazare, Tack Minor and Ross Neltner along with redshirt freshman Mildon Ambres.
Even more of them will see playing time as Brady announced Tuesday after practice that Lloreda would not see action in this game. Brady’s starting lineup was undecided as of Tuesday evening.
“I’m going to play a bunch of people,” said Brady, beginning his seventh year. “There’s no telling what will happen. Jaime will not play in the game as part of his discipline package but what that does mean in a positive way is we are going to have to play more freshmen and give them more experiences that they’ve never had. The more I can expose them to what they need to be exposed to early on the better off we’ll be later on. These freshmen will make spectacular plays, but they will also make some plays that aren’t real positive either. So I envision we will be all over the board with good play, bad play.”
Lloreda’s situation stems from a violation of team rules earlier this summer.
The Tigers scrimmaged four 10-minute running clock games on Tuesday with Lloreda getting 14 points and 14 rebounds. LSU shot just 32 percent in the scrimmage but the combined teams had just 19 turnovers in the 40 minutes of play. Besides Lloreda’s 14, Ambres scored 12 and Bass and Hudson had 10 each.
For LSU this is the first of two exhibition games as the Tigers will not be in action again until Nov. 17 in preparation for the Nov. 21 opening contest of the 2003-04 season against Southern.