The Tigers showed some improvement on Saturday, especially on offense, but it wasn’t enough to pull off what would have been a massive upset.
What begin as a promising Year 1 for coach [autotag]Matt McMahon[/autotag] with a 12-1 start has very quickly gone south.
Saturday’s 79-69 loss at home against No. 4 Alabama constituted the team’s 10th-straight loss as the Tigers fall to 12-11 overall on the year and just 1-9 in SEC play. Any postseason hopes have long since dissipated, and all this team can do now is try to turn things around and end the year with some semblance of momentum.
Still, there are some reasons to be optimistic. LSU has looked better — albeit, still not great — in recent outings, and the Alabama loss was one of the better performances in recent memory as the Tigers had a very real chance to upset a top-five team.
“Thought we saw some improvement from our team, Alabama just has so much firepower and they can really score it at a high level,” McMahon said in a release. “If you go back to, I think the last seven minutes of the game, both teams really struggled to score there. We got stops but were not able to convert those into points. That said, credit to Alabama for the win.”
McMahon said the offensive rebounding and limiting turnovers specifically played a major role in giving LSU a chance to win.
“We gave up three points off turnovers today and that’s the reason we had an opportunity to be in the game,” he said. “The offensive rebounds, it’s great, it’s an effort stat and it’s great that we got 13 of them, but we don’t convert them into enough points. We just don’t have much efficiency on those offensive rebounds.”
[autotag]Derek Fountain[/autotag], who had a career game with a team-high 26 points and seven rebounds, said the losing streak provided some motivation for the team in this game.
“Tired of losing,” he said. “Alabama is (ranked) top 4, that is great, we knew that coming in. We’ve been losing lately, so all we have been trying to do is get better at competing. Alabama is a big team, so we just wanted to make sure that we were all locked in coming into the game. That is all it really was.”
The Tigers’ ability to draw fouls helped them quite a bit, as well. They had 31 attempts from the charity stripe, of which they made 24. Fountain accounted for 12 of those.
“We just always want to be aggressive, that is what we have been talking about in practice,” guard [autotag]Cam Hayes[/autotag] said. “I think it helped us because we shot 31 free throws tonight. So, that is good, we just still have to fix the little things to win games.”
A hard-fought effort is little consolation for a team whose losing streak has now hit double-digits, but there’s reason to think this team could be improving as it looks to snap the skid on the road against Mississippi State on Wednesday night.
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