BATON ROUGE – The LSU Tigers begin a two-game road swing as they travel to Columbia, Missouri to take on the Missouri Tigers at 5 p.m. Saturday at the Mizzou Arena.
The game is one of two important Southeastern Conference games that will take place Saturday night with the rest of the league involved in the SEC/Big 12 Challenge. The standings will be all even after play on Saturday with 12 games remaining over the next six weeks.
The LSU-Mizzou game will be televised on the SEC Network (Mike Morgan and Pat Bradley) with the broadcast on the affiliates of the LSU Sports Radio Network (Eagle 98.1 FM in Baton Rouge) with the Voice of the Tigers Chris Blair and former LSU head coach John Brady on the call.
LSU is 15-3 and 5-0 in the SEC and looking to bump its national ranking of No. 25 in the Associated Press media poll and just outside the top 25 in the ESPN Coaches Poll. The Tigers are coming off a 92-82 win over Georgia on Wednesday in the Maravich Center.
Missouri is 10-7 and 1-4 in the SEC after a 72-60 loss at Arkansas on Wednesday at Bud Walton Arena. In that game, Mark Smith made six three-pointers in scoring 22 points to lead the Tigers. Missouri led the game by two, 34-32, at halftime, but Arkansas scored 40 second half points to pull away.
Missouri shot 45.2 percent from the field and out rebounded the Razorbacks, 30-29. But the Hogs had a 30-16 advantage in paint points and took advantage of 24 turnovers by Missouri to have a 27-13 advantage in points off turnovers.
Jordan Geist leads Missouri in scoring at 13.3 points a game with Smith at 12.6.
LSU’s Tremont Waters had a big night for the Tigers with 26 points and more importantly no turnovers for the first time in his 51 game career at LSU. Skylar Mays scored 20 points and Naz Reid had 15 points and a team high 7 rebounds.
LSU is expected to go with the same lineup it has used of late with guards Waters, Mays and high-flying Marlon Taylor and forwards Reid and Kavell Bigby-Williams with Ja’vonte Smart, Emmitt Williams and Darius Days off the bench.
The Tigers will play on the road again next Wednesday against Texas A&M (8 p.m. ESPN2, LSU Sports Radio Network) before returning home for a Feb. 2 game at 5 p.m. against Arkansas.
Coach Will Wade met with the media late Friday morning and here are some of his comments:
Opening statement…
“We’re heading to Missouri (Saturday). SEC teams this week, I think, are 1-6 on the road – the only win being (top ranked) Tennessee over Vanderbilt. It will be a challenge for us on the road. The big kid (Jeremiah) Tilmon is really kid. When he gets going for them, they’re a totally different team when they play inside out. (Jordan) Geist, the point guard is a good player. He can really shoot it. The wings are very, very good three-point shooters. They lead the league in three-point percentage. We’ll have to do a good job guarding the three-point line. They’re tough. They’re very physical. They’re a typical coach (Cuonzo) Martin team. He does a very, very good job. It will be tough sledding for us. We’re going to have guard better than we have in the pass game. Baskets are not going to come as easy for us.”
On how practice has been going since a rough defensive outing against Georgia…
“We’re working at it. Hopefully we’ll be better. Hopefully we have some of the things solved. We tried to tweak our scheme a little bit. Change a few things to help some things in our defense. Hopefully we show up tomorrow.”
On what caused the team to have a difficult time defending on Wednesday against Georgia…
“We weren’t disconnected. We were a little bit discombobulated. We weren’t in our right mind. We were a little bit out of whack, but we were hopefully able to get some of that stuff corrected yesterday with the guys. Hopefully we play better tomorrow.”
On how much better they need to play on defense…
“We played pretty decent defense for 27 minutes. The problem is, that’s not going to get it done when you play really good teams in our league. We need to be able to play for a complete game. That’s something we’re focusing on – playing for a full 40 minutes. We’ve got to be able to sustain our defense and sustain what we’re doing for longer stretches.”
On how the players feel after their defensive effort on Wednesday…
“Winning is the point of what we do. It’s what goes into winning that I focus on. I’m much more worried about how we go about winning. I don’t like to cheat it when you win. You’ve got to understand what goes into winning, how hard it is to prepare, how hard it is to win any game. I focus more on the ingredients that go into how make the meal. Everybody just wants to have the meal served and to be able to taste well and for everything to go well. I’m worried about all that other stuff. That’s the stuff I want to get corrected because we didn’t have the right ingredients going into the game and it showed. The food was burnt. I’m focused on the process of what it takes to win. If you put the right stuff in, the win will be the outcome, but you have to have to right stuff going in the input. That’s where my frustration was and the guys knew that. You know when you don’t put the right stuff in. You go to the gas pump and you put diesel in, you know that you didn’t put the right stuff in your car – unless you’ve got a truck that takes diesel. You know that and maybe you drive around a few miles on that and hope that you can get to the next gas station where you can change it back out, but you know that’s not a good way to go. It’s not going to be good long-term for you. That’s where we are.”
On how they can go about fixing the defensive issues…
“Nothing is easy to fix. We’ve got some issues that we need to fix. We’ve got some issues that we have to get corrected. Nothing is easy to fix. We went about it yesterday and today and tried to get it fixed as best we can. At this point in the season you’re not necessarily fixing stuff as much as you’re plugging gaps. We’re just putting duct tape here and hoping that one holds for a little bit. Then you go duct tape something else and hope that holds. If the duct tape rips off over here, you’ve got to go back and plug that one up. You’re just plugging stuff up more than you’re fixing it. We did try to put a little bit more time into hopefully getting it fixed.”
On Tremont’s performance against Georgia…
“He made simple plays and good plays. His passing angles were very good – he was just in sync. I thought he made great decisions.”
On not playing the SEC/Big 12 Challenge…
“It means you are in the bottom four if you are not in it. We are worried about beating Missouri. We have to beat Missouri – it is an SEC game. I do agree with what the SEC has done, I know everyone just wants to plug teams in each year, but there are all sorts of scheduling stuff, you could end up playing all sorts of road games. The SEC is going to change some stuff up, but certainly we would like to be playing this weekend in that, but we were not good enough to play in it. We are going to play Missouri and Missouri is a good team and it is a big SEC game. I do not think the teams playing in the SEC/Big 12 Challenge are just not going to worry about the two SEC games being played this weekend. At the end of the day, tomorrow night at 11, the standings are going to be different for four teams in the SEC and everybody is playing it out from there.”
On placing emphasis on shot distribution…
“We emphasize we want the ball to move, we want the ball to find the open guy. We work on that quite a bit. We have unselfish guys, so that helps.”
On importance of next several games…
“SEC teams are 1-6 on the road this week. The number one team in the country barely beat the last place team in our league in overtime, in which was like a virtual home game. Nashville is 75 to 80 percent Tennessee fans in comparison to Vanderbilt fans. There is no easy road game in our league. This is going to be a battle on Saturday and then we will have to battle up again on Wednesday at Texas A&M. We do not look at it like that, we have to worry about everything we have to prepare the right way, to give ourselves a chance to play well against Missouri. That is all that matter.”
On fixing defensive issues…
“We just spend a little bit more time in practice on it than we typically do. We have had to add a couple extra segments. We did an extra segment in practice yesterday on two different areas we need to shore up. When you do that, you are cutting from something else, we have to keep fresh legs. We need to keep them fresh, so you have to give and take when you do that.”
On Kavell not playing as aggressive against Georgia…
“He got the foul early and when he got the foul, he was not as aggressive. He was playing the rest of the half to not pick up the second foul. By doing that, he did not play as well and he did not play his game. He knows and we talked it through.”