Tilmon’s return and player meeting factored into Mizzou Tigers’ win at South Carolina
Cuonzo Martin didn’t want to add to any pressure to what his Missouri basketball players might have felt during their three-game losing streak.
“If you’re a competitive player it’s already tough, and it doesn’t matter what coach said,” Martin said. “I’m already upset. So, I drop a 50-pound brick on their back on top of a loss? What good does that do?”
Maintaining faith and confidence was Martin’s message, and whatever was said or not said this week worked. The Tigers ran past South Carolina 93-78 on Saturday in Columbia, South Carolina.
It also helps to have a stud player back in the fold. Center Jeremiah Tilmon returned after missing the previous two games to be with his family after his grandmother had died.
Saturday, Tilmon’s presence was felt, of all places, at the free throw line. The 49% shooter made all seven of his attempts. Add his field goal perfection on five tries, and all 12 shots Tilmon threw at the basket dropped through.
“It’s definitely a good feeling having Jeremiah back,” guard Mark Smith said. “We let him take his time away because he needed that. Just to him back you could feel it on the court. Looked like he didn’t miss a beat.”
Five Tigers finished in double figures in the team’s second-best output of the season. Missouri shot 57.6% from the floor, 45% from beyond the three-point arc and committed only nine turnovers while scoring 1.274 points per possession.
Yet, a sense of here-we-go-again had to have occupied space in the players’ minds when South Carolina sliced a 16-point halftime deficit to seven with about 10:30 remaining.
In its losing streak, Missouri had blown two halftime leads and in the three games was outscored by an average of 11 points.
No gut-punch outcome this time. After the Gamecocks made it 59-52, Tilmon, Mark Smith and Dru Smith scored all of the points in a 16-6 run that restored a 17-point lead. Mark Smith had seven straight in the stretch.
Moments before the run, the Tigers had called a timeout and challenged themselves to flip the momentum.
“We said we had to nip this in the bud right now, we had to get rolling,” Mark Smith said. “That’s exactly what we did.”
Or maybe the things changed even earlier, before the team boarded a flight to South Carolina.
The players called a meeting, no coaches, to chew on the poor play of late and remind themselves they are good enough to have defeated several ranked teams and climb into the nation’s top 10.
“You get everything out there, everything off your chest,” Dru Smith said. “Anything that’s been bugging you, or anything someone can say to help us we want to get it out there.”
Improvement revealed itself in several areas. The defense was good early, the passing was crisp, scoring distributed. There was plenty for the Tigers to like about what transpired, keeping in mind the Gamecocks are struggling and now have lost five straight.
But just getting a victory changes the perspective of a team that is NCAA Tournament-bound, and the rest of the schedule seems loaded with opportunity to improve the record, starting with Tuesday’s visit from the team that started the recent skid, Mississippi.
This story was originally published February 20, 2021 at 4:34 PM.