BATON ROUGE — The LSU men’s basketball team begins its 100th anniversary season Saturday afternoon at 1 p.m. in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center against Southwestern Athletic Conference preseason favorite Jackson State University.
The game marks the LSU debut of new head coach Trent Johnson, who comes to Baton Rouge after four years as the head coach of the Stanford Cardinal, taking Stanford to the NCAA Sweet 16 a year ago. Prior to that, he was the head coach at the University of Nevada for five years. Johnson is 7-2 in opening games as a head coach.
When asked earlier this week if his where he would like then to be, Johnson in his normal honest style professed: “We want to be perfect right now, and we’re not perfect,” he said. “We are better than we were the first day of practice, but no, we aren’t where we need to be. That doesn’t matter. (Saturday) we need to be ready to play and compete at a high level.”
Tickets, as part of LSU’s “Tipoff Weekend” that includes the Sunday women’s State Farm Tipoff Classic doubleheader that features Texas A&M and Notre Dame, are just $1 and available online through Saturday morning at LSUsports.net. Tickets for the game will go on sale at 11:30 a.m. at the upper concourse ticket windows of the Maravich Center.
Students, as usual, get in free by showing a valid LSU ID and the first 1,000 students at the basketball game will have an opportunity to get into Tiger Stadium first for the LSU-Troy football game that evening. Also the first 1,000 fans will receive rally towels. The acrobatic Red Panda will perform at halftime and for the first time ever, the entire “Golden Band From Tigerland” will be on hand for the basketball game.
Football parking passes and street closures will be in effect. Basketball fans are asked to park in the “O” Lot Grass area and the Levee Lots where fans can show their parking pass or basketball ticket and receive a shuttle ride to Lot A. Fans are advised to enter the campus for the basketball game on the West side and Nicholson Drive as some streets on the opposite side of campus will be shut down because of the Homecoming Parade.
Jackson State was 14-20 a year ago and 10-8 in the SWAC after winning the conference automatic bid in 2007. They are picked to win again under sixth-year head coach Tevester Anderson who is well-known in SEC circles after long-time assistant coaching roles at Auburn and Georgia. Leading the team are returnees Grant Maxey, a junior forward, and senior guard Darrion Griffin, who averaged better than 14 points a game a season ago.
LSU will start four players very used to starting and a point guard who hopes to show how much his maturity and hard work under Coach Johnson’s system has paid off for him and the Tigers. Garrett Temple is back to start for his fourth year, having started 96-of-99 games. Temple moves to the three guard position in the three-guard, forward, center offense with senior Marcus Thornton at the shooting guard.
Thornton hit for 90 treys a season ago and led the league in league games scoring at over 21 points a game. He was only the second player in LSU history to his 90 three-pointers in a season and will be watched closely to see how the new three-point arc, moved back a foot to 20-9 affects him and other long-range shooters.
Chris Johnson, the 6-11 senior center, surged at the end of the year after missing seven games with a broken bone in his right hand and will be looked to continue to show improvement as this season begins.
Sophomore Bo Spencer has moved into the point guard position in Trent Johnson‘s offense, having shown improvement to earn the starting spot.
“Bo has been doing a good job,” said Johnson. “He’s probably improved as a player as much as anybody on our team since I’ve been here. He has a ways to go, but he’d doing a good job. He’s running the team. He’s making good decisions, but again, he, like everybody else on this group has a ways to go.”
The Tigers were 13-18 a year ago.
“It’s a whole new season,” said Temple. “The only way we look at last year is to build on it. We learned a lot of lessons from last year, and we need to build on it. We?ve got a whole new team, a new vision and a new coaching staff, and anything can happen. In the first game of the season, we’ve got a clean slate, so we’re not really worried about last year as much as just playing this one game. No matter who we player, we’re going to come out and play hard.”