BATON ROUGE — The LSU men’s basketball team held its second major scrimmage of the preseason as the Tigers begin to wrap up preparations for the team’s first exhibition game on Nov. 1 against Belhaven.
LSU went through four 10-minute quarters with various team combinations as the coaches looked at various units to see how players reacted to playing with each other.
Marcus Thornton led LSU in scoring with 27 points, hitting three treys and scoring 21 points over the final 20 minutes of play. Tasmin Mitchell had 18 points for the second straight scrimmage with Garrett Temple adding 14 points, Anthony Randolph 13, Terry Martin 11 and Dameon Mason 10.
“The object of having a game-like scrimmage is to try and improve from the last one that you did until this one and we certainly got better,” said LSU Coach John Brady. “We are in better condition. We executed better and we rebounded the ball a little bit better. There are always things obviously that we can always improve upon. But what we did a week ago to scrimmaging a week later, it was very positive and encouraging. I like the attitude of our team. We may scrimmage again Tuesday, but this will give us an opportunity to clean up a few things. We will watch a lot of tape of the scrimmage on Monday.
“Defending around the goal still needs to be a premium for us and rebounding the ball, although we were rebounding better (Saturday), are still things we need to work on. We need to guard around the post a little bit better. Other than that, I liked what we did and certainly we showed some improvement,” Brady said.
Statistically, Thornton was 11-of-17 from the field, including 3-of-8 from the three-point arc, while Mitchell was 6-of-10 from the field, including 3-of-4 from three-point range. As a team LSU was 44-of-83 from the field, 14-of-32 from the arc. Chris Johnson led the team with 10 rebounds, with Dameon Mason and Garrett Green pulling down six boards each. Bo Spencer led the scrimmage with five assists, while Terry Martin and Garrett Temple had four assists apiece. LSU had 21 assists and 23 turnovers in the combined team stats for the 40-minutes of play.