BATON ROUGE — The LSU men’s basketball team will face one its sternest tests of the 2006-07 when it hosts the No. 3-ranked Florida Gators Saturday afternoon at 3 p.m. at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.
The game will be nationally televised by CBS Sports as the third game of their tripleheader of games on the network. The radio broadcast in Louisiana will be available on the affiliates of the LSU Sports Radio Network and in the “Geaux Zone” at LSUsports.net. Nationally, the game will be available through Westwood One radio.
Tickets for all available seating for the game is sold out other than the 2,300 student seats that will be available for students on game day that can be claimed by showing their student ID.
Florida comes in with a record of 25-3, having clinched the championship of the Southeastern Conference on Wednesday with a 12-1 record and three games to play. Florida defeated South Carolina, 63-49, in Gainesville. LSU, struggling to get two more wins to clinch a non-losing record, is 14-13 overall and 3-10 in the SEC.
LSU will again be without the services of forward Glen Davis, who did not practice on Thursday or Friday with the team. Coach John Brady has said that the All-American, who continues to suffer from the effects of a right quad muscle pull sustained earlier in the month, must practice to again be available to play in a game. Sophomore forward Tasmin Mitchell, however, is expected to play after loosening two teeth during a face-first fall during practice on Thursday. Mitchell went through the entire practice on Friday.
LSU is coming off a 70-63 loss to the Wildcats on Tuesday in Lexington, a game in which the Tigers played extremely hard and remained right in the thick of the contest for 35 minutes even without Davis, the third leading scorer and top rebounder in the league. LSU will need that type of effort and maybe a little more against the Gators to pull the upset.
“It will be a challenge for us,” said LSU Coach John Brady. “It good we’ve got Florida at home. At Kentucky our team played well. We ran our offense and defended well. We’ve just got to make some plays down the stretch. It will be a challenge, but hopefully our team will be ready to play and compete as well as they did against Kentucky the other night.”
The Tigers will travel to Auburn for the final road game of the regular season before coming home for Senior Day Ceremonies honoring LSU’s Darnell Lazare and the final home game next Saturday at 7 p.m. against South Carolina. Tickets for that game are on sale at the LSU Athletics Ticket Office and online at LSUsports.net.