BATON ROUGE – The LSU men’s basketball team travels to Oxford, Miss., on Wednesday to meet the Ole Miss Rebels at Tad Smith Coliseum.
Game time is 8 p.m. and the game will be televised live on CSS, www.ESPN3.com and Cox 4 in Baton Rouge and Lafayette. The game will be shown on tape delay at 9 p.m. on Cox Sports Television following the New Orleans Hornets game.
Coach Trent Johnson of LSU met with the media in his usual Monday afternoon media session. Here are some of his comments:
Opening Statement …
“Obviously Ole Miss handled us very well at home. They’re playing very well. Chris Warren is probably underrated on a national level from the standpoint of a basketball player. Obviously those of us in the SEC know how special he is. He makes so many big plays for them off the dribble, he creates for his teammates, and he’s a better defender. You can go back two years ago when he was hurt and it speaks volumes of the impact he had on the team with him not being out there. We need to do as good a job as we can to try and contain him. I thought our previous two games at home we had an opportunity to win. I thought the guys were tight (at the end of the game Saturday) after looking at the tape over and over again. They didn’t step up and shoot the ball with confidence, and that’s probably a by-product of struggling. We will keep pushing forward, and we are getting better in some aspects in terms of defending and rebounding. It’s nice now that Storm (Warren) is back out at practice and obviously Ralston (Turner) is back. I haven’t talked to Matt (Derenbecker), but I think his ankle should be OK. So we should be as healthy as we have been up until this point, with the exception of Jalen Courtney who is in a cast.”
On Ole Miss hitting a lot of three’s against LSU in the second half in first meeting …
“They had excellent ball movement in the second half against our zone. At that particular time we had done a decent job zone defensive wise, but they made some necessary adjustments in the second half and ran out on us. They had three three’s in a row, so we went from being down five to being down 15. We’re going to mix it up. Our man defense has been decent, and it has been better at home. It’s one thing to say you get to shooters, but their skill level, talent, and athleticism causes a lot of problems for us. Anytime you can beat a team like Kentucky it speaks volume to how talented you are.”
On what Ole Miss has done to get better defensively after struggling at the beginning of the year …
“I think when you say struggle it was who they were playing. They were playing teams in the top half of the league and they were playing some teams that were pretty talented and pretty good. In terms of their philosophy and their system, it’s pretty much the same. They’re going to guard you in man and they’re going to contest shots. If they fall behind they’re going to pick you up from full court, apply pressure and switch from man to zone once in a while.”
On how LSU has improved defensively …
“I think we are doing a better job of putting a body on people and blocking out. In particular I thought Andre (Stringer) did a decent job defensively in keeping guys out of the lane. I thought he did a very good job with the exception of the second half with some breakdowns on (Bruce) Ellington. I just think overall we are defending better. I think at home we defended better. Now we get on the road it’s a whole different job. Point of attack, blocking out and our rotations in the man and zone have been better.”
On the approach to playing a team for a second time …
“We try to obviously improve off the things we didn’t do very well, and the things we did do well we want to make sure we go into the game and attack those. Basically from the tape that I have been watching (Ole Miss) is a much different team. They are playing even better than when we played them here, so they cause a lot of problems for us. It’s about us continuing to try and get better in all aspects of this game.”
On if he has talked to the team about the standings …
“With this team once we got out to a bad start in terms of three games in and their confidence started to waiver a little bit, I said now you understand why I always talk about one game, the next game. I try and stay consistent with that but it has been more with this group because it’s a lot of guys that this is their first time through the SEC. Also there are some guys whose roles are different. Garrett Green‘s role is different than last year, and Malcolm (White’s) role is a lot different than it was when he was with Ole Miss. I try and tell them we have X amount of games left, we have to try and get better and improve as a group. The big picture stuff as opposed to we’re in third, we’re in fourth, we’re in sixth, or we’re in seventh. One of the things I constantly talk to them about is this group is going to be together for two years. We know where we’re at, which is not where we expected to be, but the responsibility is on us to try and get back and work at it.”
On his approach when the team isn’t shooting the ball well …
“My approach is we get in, we shoot the ball and you don’t dwell on it. Mechanically if the form is good and if their shot within the framework of what we teach, then they have to stay aggressive. Aggressiveness is the whole thing. Going back to the last game there was one guy that wanted the thing down the stretch. There was one guy who was confident and wanted it, it was real obvious. Anyone watching that game could have said that. We executed four plays in our last five possessions, and a lot of guys bypassed shots. For me and it’s hard because this is a group of kids who care and they are young, but they’re tight. I talk to them all the time and tell them to relax. They have no reason to be feeling any pressure and there is no reason to be tight. The expectations for us to be good and better than we are right now were within ourselves. Going into the year we were picked to be about where we are right now. We look back on this thing there are probably three or four games that got away, but that still shouldn’t affect how you approach your game from an offensive standpoint because that is the one point of this game you can enjoy. We talk about that a lot. Again they just need to get in the gym and shoot. Ralston (Turner) was in there at 9:15 in the morning on Sunday and I am pretty sure there were a couple of other guys who I think were in the gym too.”