BATON ROUGE — The LSU men’s basketball team, off a season-opening 84-56 win over Southern University Friday night, returns to the Pete Maravich Assembly Center for a 7 p.m. Monday night game against Nicholls State University.
There is no television for the event, but the broadcast of the game will be available on the LSU Sports Radio Network (Eagle 98.1 FM in Baton Rouge) and for subscribers in the “Geaux Zone” of LSUsports.net. To watch the game live in the Geaux Zone, join the Geaux Zone now.
Tickets for the game $11 and $5 for youth (12 and under), but for this game the LSU athletic department is joining with WBRZ-TV Chief Forecaster Pat Shingleton and his annual Pat’s Coats for Kids campaign. Anyone bringing a new or used coat to the Maravich Center to donate to the campaign will receive admission to the game for just $1.
LSU and Nicholls State will be meeting for the 12th time with LSU having won the previous 11 meetings. It will be the first meeting of the teams since LSU’s opening night win of the 2002-03 season. LSU enters the game with a 53-game regular season home winning streak against Louisiana schools and a present 12-game overall winning streak that is the ninth longest in the 35-year history of the Maravich Center.
The young, athletic Tiger team came out and performed much as expected in winning the game, but Coach John Brady still realizes his team has much work to accomplish, but only a short amount of time before the team goes on the road this Saturday to face nationally-ranked West Virginia (3:30 p.m. CST, ESPN Regional).
“We had some growing pains out there a little bit,” said LSU Coach John Brady after the game on Friday. “There were a lot of times in the game we had five freshmen on the floor. At times it would show. We would get to the verge of putting the team away and something would happen defensively, we couldn’t quite get to the ball or offensively our timing wasn’t quite there to really separate the score.
“Our team just needs to grow up in a hurry. We had some things from a timing standpoint that we need to improve on a little bit. Defensively, we were pretty good at times. I like our team, and it’s going to have some times where it plays really well and have some times early on when it seems to struggle a little bit or our timing’s not quite there.”
The Colonels come into the game 0-1 after opening its season on the road at Indiana Friday, 99-65. The bright spot was Australian Stefan Blaszczynski who scored 26 points against the Hoosiers. Ryan Bathie added 11. Indiana led by just 10 at the half, 52-42, but outscored the Colonels, 47-23, in the final 20 minutes. J. P. Piper is in his second year as the head coach of Nicholls State.
Against Southern, Tasmin Mitchell led LSU with 19 points and 12 rebounds, while Glen Davis and Tyrus Thomas added 12 points. Davis had his third consecutive (dating back to last year) and 11th double-double of his career by pulling down 10 boards. Darrel Mitchell, LSU’s lone senior, scored 13 points.
After the West Virginia game on Saturday, the Tigers will return home for the start of a five-game home stand that begins Nov. 29 against Houston in an 8 p.m. regionally-televised contest. The run of home games runs through the middle of December with a 10-day break after the Houston game for the time period that was originally the dead week/final exam schedule when the basketball schedule was made. Because of Hurricane Katrina, the school schedule was altered and the team will have to deal with playing three games during the rescheduled final exam period.