BATON ROUGE — The LSU Tigers, coming off an emotionally draining double-overtime 97-94 win Wednesday night at Starkville against Mississippi State, must now try to keep the momentum going when they host Ole Miss Saturday night at 6 p.m. at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.
Tickets for the game start at $14 and are available at LSUsports.net and then will be on sale beginning at 4:30 p.m. at the upper ticket windows of the Maravich Center. Youth tickets (ages 3-12) are $5 and LSU students get in free with their ID card.
The game will be televised regionally on FSN (Cox cable channel 38 in Baton Rouge) and the broadcast will be available on the affiliates of the LSU Sports Radio Network (New Country 100.7 FM The Tiger in Baton Rouge) and in the Geaux Zone at LSUsports.net.
The Tigers with the win on Wednesday is now 20-4 on the year and 8-1 in the Southeastern Conference. LSU is two games up on Mississippi State in the Western Division and Florida, South Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee in the SEC Eastern Division. All five teams are 6-3.
But the Tigers will have to play Ole Miss without starting point guard sophomore Bo Spencer after Spencer sprained his left ankle in the Mississippi State game on Wednesday. Coach Johnson has declared him out hopefully for just this game but Spencer is listed as day-to-day at this point.
In his place, Terry Martin, who scored 11 points and played 31 minutes against the Bulldogs, will move to the wing guard and Garrett Temple will resume his role of the last two years and will play the point.
Marcus Thornton, the team’s leading scorer at 19.9 points a game will be the third guard, with Tasmin Mitchell at forward and Chris Johnson at senior. Mitchell, the junior from Denham Springs, is the reigning SEC Player of the Week and showed no ill effects from that honor with 41 points and 11 rebounds in 49 minutes with five assists and no turnovers.
The Tigers were 83-51 winners over Ole Miss in the first meeting last month in Oxford. LSU used runs of 12-0 and 11 -0 early in the contest to get in a commanding position that LSU never relinquished. But Ole Miss has won three of its last four games, although the last was a 71-61 loss at Vanderbilt, but has had a week to prepare for this particular game.
“It’s like I told these guys right before we went and watched video of Ole Miss ? our reward for winning in double overtime is that we get to play a basketball team that went I there and beat them in regulation,” said Coach Trent Johnson of LSU. “Again, I said to the guys ? that wasn’t Ole Miss (in the first meeting with LSU). It was just like when we went to Utah, that wasn’t one of those games. When you look at College basketball for the majority of the team, there are going to be games like that where you are off and whatever reason, you’re not right and the other team is playing well …
“I do know this. We just got through beating a team in double overtime. They beat them in regulation. They’ve been to some places and won that we got to go to. This is league play. Andy Kennedy has done an exceptional job. I’m always been impressed with their physical strength.”