By Ron Higgins
If you’ve been hibernating the last few winters from the end of an LSU bowl game until the start of baseball season, it’s an excellent time to again proclaim yourself as a basketball fan.
The 16-3 Tigers, as second-year coach Will Wade said Monday before he and his team head to Texas A&M where they hope Wednesday night to avoid repeating the football team’s seven-overtime regular season-ending debacle, are one of four teams in Power Six conferences still unbeaten league play.
There’s Washington in the Pac 12 and defending national champion Villanova in the Big East. And a third of the way through the SEC schedule, 19th ranked LSU shares the conference lead at 6-0 with No. 1 Tennessee.
“We’ve got a good way about us, I like where we are and I like where we are going,” said Wade, whose team has won two SEC road games in overtime including Saturday’s 86-80 miracle at Missouri when LSU rallied from a 14-point deficit with 2:14 left in regulation. “We don’t talk a whole lot about the past.
“For us to be able to pull some wins out like we’ve pulled out, we’ve got toughness, we’ve some fiber to us. I’m proud of what we’ve done, but we’ve got to be better or it’s going to turn on us soon.”
No doubt these Tigers are a drastic improvement over the 10-21 embarrassment produced by Johnny Jones in his final year as LSU’s coach in 2016-17.
It’s a memory so painful, including a school-record 15 losses, that junior guard Skylar Mays prefers to skip the subject when asked about his nightmare freshman season.
“I don’t like to go back to that,” Mays said of LSU finishing 2-16 in the SEC. “I like to go on to what I learned since Coach Wade got here. Since the first workout we had with him, I learned what a good day of work was. I told myself then I was never going to short myself.”
He hasn’t and neither has sophomore guard Tremont Waters, Mays’ running mate in a duo that’s combining for 32.3 points, 9.5 assists and 4.5 steals in SEC play
As giddy as the Tigers have been over their nine-game win streak, it’s Mays, Waters and junior Marshall Graves (a former walk-on) who are making sure the rest of their relatively young teammates understand the process of winning is as important as winning itself.
Wade’s first LSU squad last season started 11-4 and 2-1 in SEC play before losing five of its next six games. The eventual 18-15 Tigers weren’t mentally or physically equipped to sustain prolonged success.
Thanks to Wade’s 2018 recruiting class that’s a mixture of five-star talent and junkyard dogs, LSU has so far avoided a death spiral.
Yet as successful as Wade’s Warriors have been, they have yet to play any of the five teams ranked ahead of them (in order Kentucky, Tennessee, Auburn, Mississippi State, Florida) in the league’s preseason media day projected poll.
Every SEC win LSU has captured so far (Alabama, Arkansas, Ole Miss, South Carolina, Georgia, Missouri) were against opponents projected to finish below it.
Which means it’s about to get real for the Tigers.
Even Texas A&M, with just a 1-5 SEC record, is capable of flexing its muscles. The Aggies are coming off a 65-53 home win over Kansas State in Saturday’s SEC/Big 12 challenge.
One overwhelming positive for LSU to date is its ability to win games in different ways.
The Tigers dominated at Ole Miss, won in overtime at Arkansas after blowing a 12-point lead in the final 9:19 of regulation and beat South Carolina by 22 points in Baton Rouge despite going just 3-of-19 from 3-point range.
LSU led Georgia by 17 in the second half at the PMAC before holding on for a 10-point win after the Bulldogs shot 58.6 percent from the field in the second half. Then, the Tigers looked dead in the water at Missouri until nine Mays points in 30 seconds resurrected a comeback.
“We’ve experienced the greatest and the worst possible moments,” Waters said. “We were down on the road and came back and won. At home, we’ve gotten leads and learned how to build on it.
“We’ve gotten through it all. We’ve just got to stay level-headed and stay humble as a team.”
That's part of Wade's job description.
He didn’t harp on the Tigers’ win at Mizzou that he characterized “as pulling a rabbit out of a hat.” Instead, he watched game film of only how LSU dug its hole, not how it escaped it.
“I’m more worried about staying out of the position at 14 (points) down,” Wade said. “I cut the film off at three minutes. I didn’t want the last part to taint how I felt about the game. I watched the first 37 minutes and I didn’t particularly care for a lot of things I saw.”
