BATON ROUGE — LSU Coach Trent Johnson met with the media Tuesday to give an overview of the team’s upcoming game Saturday at 1 p.m. on ESPN2 against Washington State at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.
LSU is 9-1 on the year riding a 12-game home winning streak dating back to last year, while Washington State is 8-3 with its only losses to Gonzaga, Baylor and Pittsburgh.
Tickets for the game are available online at LSUsports.net.
Tickets start at $11 and it is “Take A Kid To The Game Weekend” at LSU and youth tickets are just $1 with the purchase of an adult ticket. Here are some of Coach Johnson’s comments Tuesday to the media:
QUOTES FROM TRENT JOHNSON
“I brought closure to our game (with McNeese State) real soon because it was a hard-fought contest and we had some guys that are banged up. We had some guys that are spent emotionally after coming off a very hard-fought game with Texas A&M. We are going to watch video tape (Tuesday), walk through some of the video adjustments we are going to have to make against Washington State, try to get out of here around 4:30 p.m. and then go 8 a.m. on the 24th and have Christmas Day off.
“Washington State without question is probably one of the best defensive teams in the country. They have been for the last three or four years. I’m very familiar with them. There is only one team that has scored over 58 points against them and that was Gonzaga. There losses are to Gonzaga, at that time the No. 5 team in the country, Baylor is ranked and Pittsburgh. This is a basketball team that has been battle tested. They have a returning nucleus of good basketball players. They have three starters on their team with a lot of NCAA tournament experience. This is a basketball team that we are really, really have to stay poised and it is going to be a possession by possession basketball game. This is a team that you are not going to be able to take a bad shot against without them capitalizing. A six-point or a 10-point lead for a team like this is like 20. That’s what we as a staff and I as the head coach have to get through to these guys so they get a good understanding. This is going to be a very, very physical game. They are strong. They are extremely well-coached and it’s going to be interesting
“The sum of what (Washington State) does is bigger than the parts. They are going to double the post, post-to-post. They are going to rotate down from the weak side. On ball (screens) they are going to hedge, they going to bump cutters. They are going to play the game the way it is supposed to be played and they are going to physical. We’ve had a level of success in the past (at Stanford). We beat them three times last year. Those three games and I’ve never been in a situation where you won and you feel like we lost. That’s the biggest compliment I can give a team like Washington State. Ben Holland said it best two years ago that when you play a Tony Bennett coached team that it’s like a root canal. That’s what it is. This will be a possession by possession game and we will have to understand that if we get careless with it like (Monday) night, we are in trouble.
“They make you on every pass, every cut, they make you feel their presence and it’s good, clean hard physical basketball. I’m not so sure that this team has been in a situation like this.”
“Basically, we have to do what we do best, go inside-out because we do have a quickness advantage, but more than anything, we have to take care of the basketball. When we have open shots and they don’t go down, we have got to sprint back defensively and really dig in and compete. When you look at (Monday), when we were up 11 and we had three, maybe four turnovers, ill-advised careless turnovers. If you have those to start a game like Washington State, you are looking at a 10-point deficit and it’s going to take some real discipline to get it back to where that thing is workable. We’ve got to take care of it. This is probably the best defensive team we’ve seen to this point and may see all year.”