Mizzou’s shooting struggles lead to loss at Texas A&M

Kassius Robertson exited the Missouri locker room with a hood over his head and frustration in his voice. He had just finished one of his worst shooting performances of the season, and he turned right toward the Tigers’ bus with little interest in doing anything else as he passed reporters in the belly of Reed Arena.

“I don’t have time for that today,” the graduate transfer guard said after Missouri lost 60-49 to the Texas A&M Aggies on Saturday.

Robertson, Mizzou’s best shooter and offensive player, had made 1 of 11 field goals against the Aggies (13-6, 3-5). The Tigers (13-6, 3-3) made just four of 18 threes.

But Robertson — who a team staffer convinced to return and talk to reporters a few minutes later — thought something simpler was the issue in this 11-point loss, the Tigers’ second greatest margin of defeat this season.

“Outtoughed us,” Robertson said. “Not much more than that.”

Robertson said missed threes weren’t the problem; missed layups and box-outs were.

The Aggies outrebounded the Tigers 46-38 and scored 11 second-chance points to Missouri’s three. They had 32 points in the paint compared to Mizzou’s 22. Texas A&M blocked five Missouri shots.

“They seemed to outtough us,” senior forward Jordan Barnett said.

There’s that word again.

The Tigers almost always have the size advantage in games. They have two 6-10 players in Jeremiah Tilmon and Reed Nikko and one 6-11 forward, Jontay Porter.

But A&M has Tyler Davis, a 6-10 junior who leads the team in scoring this season. He finished with 11 points and 14 rebounds. The Aggies also have one of the preseason SEC players of the year, 6-10 Robert Williams, who had 13 points and nine rebounds.

And after starting out 1-for-7 in shooting, those two began to push Missouri around late in the first half, right around when Mizzou tried an ultra-big rotation that included Nikko, Tilmon and 6-7 Kevin Puryear.

With about 5 minutes left in the first half, Williams scored all of Texas A&M’s points during a 7-2 Aggies run that put them up 24-14.

Davis then scored the Aggies’ final five points of the half, including a couple on a put-back dunk.

“They were tough,” Missouri coach Cuonzo Martin said of Williams and Davis. “They played hard.”

Martin said when Missouri doesn’t make threes, it must grab offensive rebounds and score inside. But both of those were hard to do against the Aggies.

Porter, who took eight shots and went scoreless, was ineffective when he tried to post up. Barnett — who tied Tilmon and Jordan Geist with a team high nine points — had the ball slip out of his hands three times in the first half, including twice on one possession.

Mizzou made just 7 of 27 shots in the first half.

“I really thought we had good shots,” Barnett said. “They just didn't fall. When we got the ball into the post, I thought we had good shots. They just didn't fall.”

Barnett and Robertson said they didn’t think this had ever happened, that a team had proved tougher than them.

So maybe Robertson was trying to make a point when he engaged in a skirmish with two Aggies, DJ Hogg and Duane Wilson, after the first half ended and teams were leaving the court. He received a technical, but so did both of Texas A&M’s players.

That led to Robertson making two free throws to begin the half. Tilmon then made a layup, and the Tigers’ 4-0 run brought them within five points.

After trailing since the score was 3-2, Mizzou retook the lead fewer than 5 minutes into the second half on a Puryear layup off a feed from Robertson. The Missouri possession before that ended with Robertson swishing a pull-up three from the top of the key in transition.

As he came back down the court, Robertson holstered three fingers to his hip, and Martin punched the air in excitement.

The play seemed like a momentum shifter, but it wasn’t. And the shot was Robertson’s only make of the game.

After that Puryear layup, Mizzou hit just two of 11 shots — both by Tilmon — over the next 7-plus minutes, and the Aggies established an eight-point lead.

Texas A&M guard TJ Starks, who scored all 11 of his points in the second half, hit back-to-back layups through fouls. And Tonny Trocha-Morelos made an impressive turnaround jumper over Puryear that capped a 17-8 Aggie run that lasted about 8 minutes.

“It’s Division I basketball,” Martin said of Trocha-Morelos. “He’s a senior. He made some shots.”

Trocha-Morelos was the Aggies’ best player Saturday. He stole the ball from Barnett with about 4  1/2 minutes remaining, and on the following possession, Williams drew a foul from Tilmon. It was Tilmon’s fifth, which disqualified him from his fourth SEC game in six tries.

The freshman center had been one of Missouri’s strongest performers during the second half, when he scored seven of his nine points — and that was the problem for Mizzou, a potent three-point shooting team didn’t make many threes on Saturday. The Tigers’ shooting percentage against the Aggies (27.8) was their lowest of the season.

“They put down the shots that we couldn’t hit,” Barnett said. “That’s all I got.”

TEXAS A&M 60, MISSOURI 49

This story was originally published January 20, 2018 at 5:35 PM with the headline "Mizzou’s shooting struggles lead to loss at Texas A&M."