BATON ROUGE — The LSU men’s basketball team plays the first of two exhibition games Thursday at 7 p.m. in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center against a group of former college and pro players under the banner of EA Sports.
Tickets for the exhibition game are $5 and will be available beginning at 5:30 p.m. at the upper ticket windows of the Maravich Assembly Center. There will be no radio or television for this exhibition contest.
This will be the seventh time a Maury Hanks-coached team has come in to play LSU with the Tigers holding a 4-2 lead in the series. So far the EA Sports team is 1-3 on their present tour of college teams, but they have been in all three of their losses. The lone win came in the second game of the tour against Iowa State, 64-57, with the losses coming at Kansas State (62-53), Creighton (74-67) and a two-point, 77-75, loss in their most recent game on Tuesday at Providence.
The Tigers have scrimmaged three times in the last week in preparation for the game, including a major scrimmage last Saturday and a short scrimmage with officials in front of members of the LSU Sixth Man Club Tuesday evening.
“We just want to execute what we have been working on and try to get some rebounding and defending into the game and use the exhibition as a tool to get better,” said LSU Coach John Brady, entering his ninth year as the head coach of the Tigers. “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,” said Brady. “(EA Sports) usually has a pretty good collection of older players that make us do some things that are necessary to win without just running up and down the floor. It will be a good test for us.”
Some of the players on the team include Larry House, who averaged 11.1 points for the 2003 Creighton team that was 29-5. Also Zoran Viskovic, who had 18 points against Providence Tuesday, was part of the Valparaiso teams of the late 1990s that had NCAA success. He has come to the EA Sports team after playing professionally last year in Portugal.
The Tigers lineup is certainly unclear at this time, but coach Brady is expected to play just about everyone on the squad at some point. Look for Garrett Temple, Ben Voogd and Darrel Mitchell to all work the point guard position as Tack Minor will be out with a school-related suspension until the end of the fall semester on Dec. 17. Mitchell, Glen Davis, Darnell Lazare and Minor are the only returning players on the LSU team with significant playing time from last year’s team that won the SEC Western Division and finished with a 20-10 record and a post-season appearance for the fifth time in the last six seasons.
After this exhibition, LSU will face LSU-Shreveport at 7 p.m. on Tuesday (Nov. 15) before opening the regular season against Southern University on Nov. 18 in the Maravich Assembly Center.
Live stats for the exhibition game will be available at www.LSUsports.net.