Dazed and confused LSU hopes to gain clarity with a win at Texas A&M

Now, LSU is still creating a college basketball buzz but it’s because the Tigers have lost six of their last seven games. It includes three consecutive losses to TCU, Ole Miss and Vanderbilt in games LSU trailed by 16, 24 and 21 points respectively.

The Tigers (16-7 overall, 4-6 SEC) dropped out of the top 25 on Monday after spending nine weeks in the rankings.

LSU’s only win in the last 26 days was a 70-64 home win over Texas A&M on Jan. 26 and the Tigers are at A&M (15-8, 4-6) for a Tuesday night 6 p.m. rematch on the SEC Network.

“Sometimes you gotta hit rock bottom before you can move forward and hopefully not get further down than this,” LSU fifth-year coach Will Wade said. “It could but we've got to stay after it and keep trying to shore up some of the things that are really, really hurting us.”

The Tigers have a list of problems repeating from game to game. Slow starts with long stretches of poor shooting (“We just become too discombobulated too quick and it leads to us taking quick shots on offense,” Wade said), dwindling rebounding (“That’s really hurt us,” Wade said) and leaving open opposing shooters wide open (“We've got to be better on our communication,” Wade said).

How does Wade solve one or a couple or all of those struggles?

“If we could get healthy, I would love to go back to what we were doing when we were 15-1 when we had such a good eight-man rotation,” Wade said. “Go back to that lineup and bring the energy off the bench.”

That’s not going to happen if senior starting point Xavier Pinson’s previously sprained knee doesn’t fully heal. Since he suffered the injury vs. Tennessee on Jan. 8, he missed five straight games, played a combined 23 minutes against TCU and Ole Miss and didn’t play in the Tigers’ 75-66 loss Saturday at Vanderbilt.

“If we could get Pinson back close to 100 percent, we wouldn't be sitting here having this conversation right now,” Wade said. “He averages about 10 points, but there's so much other stuff that he brings to our team.

“He gives us our confidence back. He gives us the swagger back. He embodies the team spirit that we had that first part of the season. He can hold everybody else accountable to doing what needs to happen for the team to win, because he's the one who sacrificed the most to make it happen.

“With him back, we have more options.”

But until Pinson gets completely healthy, which may not happen this season, Wade has to solve his team’s obvious weaknesses with the roster he has on hand.

“When we are limited in options, if somebody does something wrong sometimes, I'd like to take them out but I don't have a whole lot else to put in,” Wade said. “And so that certainly slows down the process of fixing.

“We can't keep losing like this. I need to do a better job with the guys and put the guys that we do have available in the best positions that they can be.”

Last season when LSU was 19-10 and advanced to the second round of the NCAA tournament, the trio of Cam Thomas, Trendon Watford and Javonte Smart averaged a combined 55.3 points or 67.6 percent of the Tigers’ 81.8 points.

Either Thomas (23 points per game), Watford (16.3 ppg) or Smart (16 ppg) led LSU in scoring every game. Only once in 29 games did the Tigers’ leading scorer score fewer than 20 points.

On the other hand, LSU’s defense suffered. It had no large inside players for rim protection and few players that placed a premium on defense. The Tigers allowed 75.2 points per game and basically won games because the ball stayed mostly in the hands of Thomas, Watford and Smart.

With Thomas and Watford now in the NBA and Smart in the NBA’s developmental league, Wade made it his mission in recruiting to improve LSU’s defense. But in doing so, he signed three freshmen low post players (Efton Reid, Jerrell Colbert and Bradley Ezewiro) and only Reid has played substantial minutes playing all 23 games.

In retrospect, especially since sophomore transfer guard Adam Miller of Illinois sustained a season-ending torn ACL, Wade said he overreacted to last season’s lack of inside size by signing three centers.

“I got too many big guys right now, guys that are not helping us much or not helping us at all,” Wade said. “I wish with one of those (scholarships) maybe we would have gone and got a big-time shooting wing or another combo guard.”

That is something that will be addressed in LSU’s next recruiting class as Wade heads into the final season of his six-year contract.

“No matter how this season turns out, we're gonna come back roaring next year,” Wade said. “I now understand the balance we have to have with the roster composition between offense and defense. I understand what it takes now to build a top 10 offense and a top 10 defense on the same team, which will give you a chance to cut the nets down. We're going to do that. There's been some growing pains to get there.

“It's taken me five years to figure that out. We've won quite a bit while we figured it out. But look, I'm not perfect. I've made mistakes and I'm gonna learn from them.”

In the meantime, Wade said he must get his team playing like a team again.

“The strength of our team is the strength of our team,” Wade said. “Things get out of whack a little bit when people (his players) don't think we're winning because of our team. They think we're winning because I did this or I did that and I need to do more of this.

“Last year, we could win like that (because of the Thomas/Watford/Smart trio). This year when that stuff starts seeping in – we’re not as detailed as we need to be with what we're doing – then we're not as good as we need to be as a team.”

Wade said he understands the way LSU’s disgruntled fan base feels about the biggest losing nosedive in his entire nine-year career as a head coach with previous stops at Chattanooga and VCU.

“Five years ago, people were ambivalent to our program as kind of a bridge between football and baseball,” Wade said. “Now people are excited and are bought in and it hurts when you're bought in and it doesn't go how you want it to go. It hurts. Everybody's got a right to feel that way. I don't blame anybody for feeling that way. You should be upset. We hadn't gotten the job done.

“But we're gonna come out of it on the other side, whether it's this year or the future, we're gonna be better. We're gonna be better.”