BATON ROUGE — The 21st-ranked LSU men’s basketball team hopes for the success at home it has enjoyed for part of four seasons when it resumes Southeastern Conference play Wednesday night at 7 p.m. against the Vanderbilt Commodores at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.
There will be no live TV for the game that will be shown on a same-night tape delay at 9 p.m. on CST (Cable Ch. 37 in Baton Rouge). The radio broadcast will be available on the LSU Sports Radio Network (flagship Eagle 98.1 FM in Baton Rouge) and at LSUsports.net in the “Geaux Zone.”
Tickets for the game are available online at LSUsports.net and all day Wednesday at the LSU Athletic Ticket Offices. Tickets, for $14 and $5 for youth (3-12) will be available at the upper ticket windows of the Maravich Center beginning at 5:30 p.m. Students may enter the game with their student IDs and this is the annual student point game to earn their priority points for future ticket allocations.
LSU is 13-5 and in a three-way tie for first place in the wild SEC Western Division at 2-2 with Alabama and Mississippi State. Vanderbilt is 3-2 after doing what no SEC West team has done so far this season, win on the road. The Commodores, 13-6 overall, won Saturday at Rupp Arena in Lexington, downing Kentucky, 72-67.
LSU fell to 2-2 Saturday with its second league road loss, 72-52, at Arkansas.
But LSU still has not lost at home in the SEC since the next-to-last-home game of the 2004 season against the Wildcats. A win over Ole Miss in the final home game of 2004 started the streak that continued with undefeated 8-0 campaigns at home in the league in 2005 and 2006. LSU has wins over Auburn and Ole Miss to run the streak to 19, the third longest in school history and the longest in the 36-year history of the Maravich Center.
A win against Vanderbilt would give the Tigers 20 straight wins, tying the second longest conference home winning streak set by the Bob Pettit led Tigers in the 1950s.
Coach John Brady hopes to see his team find the key to making shots that will help propel the LSU offense forward again.
“There are two things about our team that we’ve got to improve upon,” Brady said. “We need to work on executing offense and staying with it a bit longer, and of course making some shots. I think that we’ve done a good job of spreading the ball around, and our shots have been good ones. We need to work on getting those shots to fall. Sixty points in this league isn’t going to get you a win, no matter how well you do on defense and protecting the ball. You need to get at least 65-70 points to be able to win, and we’ll see how we do this Wednesday against a Vanderbilt that that’s playing very good right now.”
The Tigers will travel to Georgia this weekend for a rare Sunday game in Athens, televised by Lincoln Financial Sports.