BATON ROUGE — The LSU men’s basketball team had a final major prep for Thursday’s exhibition opener with a 48-minute scrimmage Saturday on the floor of the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.
The Tigers played four 12-minute games with different five-man combinations taking on the rest of the Tiger squad. Ben Voogd, Darrel Mitchell, Tasmin Mitchell, Glen Davis, Darnell Lazare, Garrett Temple, Tyrus Thomas and Magnum Rolle all got time with that squad. For the 48 minutes, Darrel Mitchell scored 26 points, Thomas scored 17 and Glen Davis 13 to lead the totals.
The scrimmage used three officials sent in by the Southeastern Conference office.
“I think our scrimmage (Saturday) was very positive,” said LSU head coach John Brady. “We did a lot of good things. We’ve got several guys getting better and we’ve got more guys being able to execute even though we have youth on our team. I thought what we did today was very positive. We still need to defend the dribble a little bit better, but we’ll get there. That’s usually one of the last things to come around. From an execution standpoint, we were pretty good.”
The Tigers meet the E.A. Sports team of former college players on Thursday night at the Pete Maravich Center at 7 p.m. Tickets are on sale online at www.LSUsports.net and at the LSU Athletic Ticket Office. Coach Brady is looking forward to getting another look at his team in game situation.
“We won’t have everything in for Thursday,” Brady said. “We’ll expose our team to a lot of things between now and Thursday, but we won’t have everything covered, so there may be some deficiencies in that regard, but we just want to execute what we have been working on and try to get some rebounding and defending into that game and use it as a tool to get better. If we win the game fine, if we don’t it’s not that big an issue.
“We are going to play a lot of people and see what we can do. (E.A. Sports) usually has a pretty good collection of older players that make you do some things that are necessary to win without just running up and down the floor. It will be a good test for us.”
The regular season opener is scheduled for Friday, Nov. 18, against Southern University at the Maravich Center after a Nov. 15 exhibition contest against LSU-Shreveport.