BATON ROUGE — The LSU men’s basketball team, ranked No. 22 in the preseason AP poll and the defending Southeastern Conference regular season champions, begins its 2019-20 season Friday night at 7 p.m. in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center against the Bowling Green Falcons.
Tickets for the season opener as well as season ticket packages, mini-plans and non-conference single game tickets are available at LSUtix.net and at the LSU Athletics Ticket Office. Tickets will also go on sale on game night at 5:30 p.m. at the upper concourse ticket windows of the Maravich Center. LSU Students are admitted free to the games with a valid student ID. Children under three are also admitted free.
The game will be broadcast on the affiliates of the LSU Sports Radio Network (which includes flagship Eagle 98.1 FM in Baton Rouge; Hot 92.9 FM and WWWL 1350 AM in New Orleans; KLWB 103.7 in Lafayette; and, KWKH 1130 AM in Shreveport. The broadcasts can also be heard on LSUsports.net/live, Radio.com, Sirius XM and TuneIn.). Patrick Wright will call the game with former LSU head basketball coach John Brady.
Lyn Rollins and Victor Howell will call the streaming video broadcast of the game on SECN+.
Bowling Green, winners of 22 games a year ago, won its opener on Tuesday night against Tiffin, 94-73. The Tigers, the last team by an hour to open play among the 14 Southeastern Conference teams, is coming off an 83-70 victory on the road at Louisiana Tech last Saturday in an NCAA-charity exhibition game for tornado relief in Ruston and on the LA Tech campus.
In that game, six Tigers were in double figures scoring with Javonte Smart getting 18, Darius Days 16, Charles Manning Jr., 13, Emmitt Williams 12, Skylar Mays 11 and Trendon Watford 10 points and 10 rebounds. The Tigers shot 48.3 percent for the game and made 10 three-pointers while posting 22 assists on 29 made baskets.
Louisiana Tech out rebounded the Tigers, 48-47, but 20-10 on the offensive boards. LSU held the Bulldogs to just 32.1 percent from the field.
One disappointing part of the contest was that LSU shot just 57.7 percent from the free throw line or 57.7% percent. Last year, the Tigers shot 75.2 percent from the stripe and made over 600 free throws.
The Tigers will travel after this home opener to Richmond for a game with nationally-ranked VCU on Wednesday night (Nov. 13, 5 p.m. CT ESPN2) before returning home to host Nicholls on Saturday, Nov. 16. That game time will be 3 p.m. so fans can get home in time to watch the LSU football game at Ole Miss. LSU will also host Maryland-Baltimore County on Nov. 19 before traveling to Jamaica for the Jamaica Classic games on Nov. 22 and 2
Fans are reminded of the following items from LSU Game Operations for home games this year at the Maravich Center:
Guest Service Kiosks
Guest Service Kiosks will be located at Portal F and S on the upper concourse of the PMAC this season. Phone charging stations will be available as well as posters and other fan fair. Staff at these locations will also be able to answer questions and assist fans throughout the game.
Alcohol Sales
Based on the successful expansion of alcohol sales into the general seating areas of Tiger Stadium for football games, fans at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center will also be able to purchase beer and wine in public areas of the arena this season. Alcoholic beverages at LSU basketball games have previously been available only in private club areas. The program will now be expanded to create availability for the purchase of beer and wine to fans 21 years or older within designated public areas in and around the arena.
Consistent with SEC guidelines passed in May 2019, alcoholic beverages will be sold and dispensed at designated stationary point of sale locations on the concourse and not by vendors in seating areas. Identification checks will be required of every person at the point of each sale and alcohol will be dispensed into cups. A limit of two servings per person will be allowed with each transaction. Sales of alcohol will be halted approximately midway through the second half, coinciding with the media timeout at the 12-minute mark of men’s games and at the end of the third quarter for women’s games.
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Coach Will Wade, entering his third year as the head coach of the Tigers, met with the media after the Tipoff Luncheon at L’Auberge on Thursday and here are some of his comments:
On the difference from last year’s defense to this year’s…
“In a perfect defense, everybody’s moving at the same time. Every time that ball moves, every time there’s a change in position, everybody’s moving. You’ve got them on a string and you just pull one side of the string, everybody else moves. Last year, we weren’t all moving we had an immovable object at the front of the rim (Kavell Bigby-Williams) and he could just block everything if we were late. This year, we have much better team defensive concepts. I think our team defense is much better. We shrink the court. We will make you play in a little bit more confined spaces. The biggest difference really is our hand activity. We’re getting a lot more deflections. We’re getting our hands on the ball a lot more. We’re keeping our hand activity a lot better. And so if we can continue to do that, I think it will really help our defense and continue to move our defense forward.”
On if anybody else other than Skylar Mays will be able to create deflections on defense…
“Oh yes. Javonte is great at it. Charles Manning (Jr.)’s long and athletic. Charles is 6-5, but he’s got almost a 7-foot wingspan and he’s very, very long. He can he can really engulf the ball. He does a really, really good job on the ball.”
On what concerns him about Bowling Green…
“Well, everything. Their guard play is really, really good. One (Justin Turner) and five (Dylan Frye) are tremendous guards. They played in the conference championship game last year. They lost to Buffalo. They won 22 games. They return a vast majority of the roster. They’re number one (Turner), two (Tayler Mattos) and four (Davin Ziegler) who are very good. They’ve got a defensive guard, who’s been hurt and been out the last couple games, but started for them last year. He’ll be back. He’ll be back for our game. They’re very, very experienced. They’re very, very well coached. Their offensive concepts are advanced and good. It’s going to be a tough matchup early in the year. It’s no different than when we played, you know, some of those teams we’ve played in the past that have been very good. They’re experienced. They’ve played together. Number five (Dylan Frye) he’s a third year starter. He’s been around for a long time and has been through a lot of battles. Number one (Justin Turner) is the same way. They’re just an experienced team and a very, very good team and a very, very well coached team. It’ll be it’ll be a very, very good game. We’re going to need to play extremely, extremely well.”
On what it means to officially begin the season…
“Well, we’re excited. There’s only so much of the exhibitions and Spain and all that you can do. Our guys are ready to play somebody else for real with the popcorn popping and people in the stands and all that sort of thing. The exhibitions and that stuff have been good. It’s shown that we’ve grown since our first game in Spain. I think we’ve gotten better. But we’ve got a lot more work to do and you really can’t tell that until you get on the court. Quite frankly, at practice, I think our guys are tired of practicing against each other. I think our guys are tired of,
you know, just going hand to hand with each other. I think they’re ready to play somebody else, get after somebody else and see how we do.”
On how important it is to come out and play strong and make a statement…
“We’re not comparing ourselves to what other people do. We always want to get off to fast starts. We always tell our guys all the time that we will be fast and physical out of the gate. We want to set the tone with the pace we’re going to play with and the physicality that we’re going to play with. That’s no different than any game. We want to be fast. We want to be physical. We want to we want to set the tone and make sure the game’s played on our terms early in the game.
On where Charles Manning Jr. and Trendon Watford come from…
“It’s huge. They both won. Trendon won multiple state titles. Charles has won at a high level. Charles’ coach at Junior College, Eric Murphy has done a tremendous job. He used to coach at Northern Colorado so he’s been a Division-I coach. Bucky McMillan at Mountain Brook (where Watford played in high school) … He played for (Assistant Coach) Bill Armstrong at Birmingham Southern and he runs a tremendous program. He won three state titles with Trendon. I think he’s won six all together. He’s a tremendous coach. They run good programs so the kids are ready to come in and play. They understand what it’s like to compete every day and what it’s like to work every day. When you do that, it’s good for them because they’re ready and it’s good for your program because they’re ready.”
On having sold over 7,400 season tickets.
“It’s good for the program. It’s the most season tickets we’ve sold since Shaq was here. That was in the early 90s. I mean, that’s huge. It’s great. It means you’ve got momentum. It means people appreciate how hard our kids work, how hard they play, appreciate how we represent LSU and Louisiana. I think that’s very, very important. Look, people like a winner and when you win people show up. It’s our job to keep winning. That’s just the nature of the nature of the beast. When you win people come. I think certainly people enjoy that we win, but I think they enjoy that our guys play hard, our guys play the right way, diving on the floor, we’re all over the place. We’re doing everything we can to work and represent our people and our school as best we can. So we’re appreciative of every single one of them and hopefully we’ll continue to continue to grow it as we move forward here.”
On if Charles Manning Jr. is the player they have been looking for in perimeter defense…
“I hope so. Yeah, I think he is. I think he’s the answer to some of our perimeter defensive problems. You know, it all starts at the point of attack. We’re quick. You know, we’re quick cats out there. With Trendon and Emmitt and even Days has improved his quickness. We’re smaller, but we’re quicker. When we’re smaller and quicker and you’ve got guards that can be physical, get on the ball and keep the ball in front, keep the ball out of the paint – that is a recipe to the beginning parts of a very, very good defense.
On having experience coaching smaller teams…
“You can coach a bunch of different ways. It’s my job to adjust to what we have, but I do think I’ve certainly had teams like this a lot more often than I’ve had teams like I had last season. I was also playing against other like sized teams so this is a little bit different. But if you look at the SEC – Florida’s got (Kerry) Blackshear and Kentucky’s got the big kid (Nick) Richards down low. Outside of that, everybody else’s centers are not that huge. It’s not like we’re going to be playing against a ton of them. If you look across college basketball in general, you watch those games the other night – obviously Kansas had those two bigs they were in their playing at the same time, but there’s not a ton of just unbelievable bigs where you throw it in there all the time. I think we have a good style of play for how we want to play with the group we have and I really like our group.”
On Smart’s maturation from his freshman season last year …
“Yeah he really has. I think sometimes when you don’t know exactly how many minutes you’re going to have or how it’s going to go, sometimes you try to thread too tight of a needle. When you know that you got a little more rope, you know you’re not going to be yanked at the first sign of a bad thing or two happening that you settle in and you can make simpler plays. I think Javonte will certainly do that too this season.”