‘Some guys didn’t show up’: How Mizzou’s lackluster defense doomed them at Ole Miss
The Missouri men’s basketball team looked like it was treading water against Ole Miss on Wednesday night. There was some energy in the first half, MU coach Cuonzo Martin said, but the Tigers weren’t exactly playing well.
Still, the halftime deficit was just five points. Mizzou had a whole half to go.
Then the energy disappeared. The Rebels scored nine straight points out of halftime and never looked back. The 10th-ranked Tigers (13-4, 6-4 SEC) dropped their worst game of the season, an 80-59 defeat at the Pavilion in Oxford, Mississippi.
It wasn’t just the loss, but more importantly how it came about. The energy, the aggressiveness, the rebounding, the defense — all the things Martin built his program on — all but vanished Wednesday.
“Some guys just didn’t give it tonight,” Martin said. “Some guys didn’t show up.”
Mizzou’s downfalls were connected — and it all started on defense.
It was a putrid defensive performance from the Tigers. Part of that, yes, was Ole Miss making tough shots and hitting an uncharacteristic amount of threes. But there just wasn’t enough pressure from Mizzou, Martin said. The Rebels got to their spots. Then they made it look easy hitting 56.9% of their shots.
After some early makes, Ole Miss got its confidence, Martin said. The Rebels had won their past two games, over ranked Tennessee and on the road at Auburn. They were more than willing to match up against the Tigers.
Mizzou wasn’t ready. The Tigers were outrebounded 34-19 — another Martin staple — in another lopsided effort. Martin said that edge wasn’t just because Ole Miss rarely missed shots, but that lack of energy permeated through the rest of the squad.
“Just didn’t have that edge,” Martin said. “Whether it’s making shots; energy’s high. Just didn’t have the edge that we normally have. It’s unfortunate, it really is. Then I thought we took some quick, off-balance shots. Some guys gotta do a better job of setting a physical tone and we didn’t do that tonight.”
The Tigers played solid on offense, but it was mostly a one-man show from MU guard Dru Smith, who scored an efficient 17 points. MU guard Javon Pickett had 10, though the production tailed off. Guard Xavier Pinson and forward Jeremiah Tilmon, Mizzou’s other two leading scorers, added just six each on quiet nights.
“I know that’s not who we are as a team,” Smith said. “We can’t come into games and let another team play harder than we did. I feel like that’s what happened tonight. They played us hard and they killed us on the glass.”
Tilmon attempted just four field goals. Martin said to give the opposition credit because they took away Mizzou’s big man. But that usually means other opportunities for Tilmon’s fellow Tigers to attack the rim. There wasn’t much of that Wednesday.
Pinson shot 3 for 11 (0 for 5 on threes) in an uncharacteristic game. He torched Ole Miss in two games last season but couldn’t muster up a repeat performance.
“He’s gotta be aggressive getting downhill,” Martin said of Pinson. “I thought he settled a lot on the perimeter. … And a lot of ways, when he’s not doing that, then we become stagnant.”
Mizzou’s attack was exacerbated because of its lackluster defense. The Tigers finished with zero fast-break points Wednesday. That’s after a 20-point outing against Alabama last game.
But there were so few opportunities to run because the Tigers needed to inbound after another Ole Miss score. The Rebels efficiently made shots, but that doubled as another defensive tool to forcibly slow down the Tigers. And Martin said he noticed the lack of defensive execution affecting the other end of the court.
“It’s one thing if your shot doesn’t fall,” Martin said. “The other stuff, we gotta give. We gotta defend, we gotta rebound, we gotta play hard. We gotta do that. And all of it just kind of went down.”
The Tigers have endured a rollercoaster season of highs and lows. They followed up the road loss to Auburn with three straight wins, then sandwiched that with Wednesday’s defeat.
But they’ve bounced back plenty of times before. And MU gets a boost when it hosts Arkansas at 3 p.m. Saturday in Mizzou Arena. It’s the annual Rally For Rhyan game, where the Tigers are 5-0 all-time, as they raise funds for pediatric cancer research.
“I’m not really sure what it was,” Dru Smith said. “It just felt like something was a little off. I don’t know. We have to make sure that we’re playing aggressive. Obviously, they get up in you defensively, but it’s nothing that we haven’t seen on the floor.”