Missouri faces tough basketball opener against tourney-tested Wofford

UMKC came into Mizzou Arena for the 2014-15 season opener and walked out victorious, setting an ominous tone for the 9-23 campaign that followed in Missouri coach Kim Anderson’s first year leading the men’s basketball program at his alma mater.

The new-look Tigers hope to avoid a similar fate as the 2015-16 season gets underway at 8 p.m. Friday in Mizzou Arena.

It won’t be easy against Wofford, which went 28-7 last season and reached the NCAA Tournament after winning the Southern Conference regular-season and tournament titles.

“Tough opener for us,” Anderson said Tuesday at his weekly news conference. “I think it’s important that we play well. Obviously, it’s not the end of the world if we don’t win this game, but I certainly think it would be a big boost. (Wofford) is a good team. This is a really good team.”

Missouri has churned its roster significantly — including transfers by last season’s leading scorer and rebounder, Johnathan Williams III (Gonzaga), and promising guard Montaque Gill-Caesar (San Diego State).

The Tigers brought in six new players, providing an injection of energy to a program that was beaten down by a season-ending loss to South Carolina in the first round of the SEC Tournament.

Three of the new players — freshman point guard Terrence Phillips, freshman shooting guard K.J. Walton and freshman forward Kevin Puryear, a Blue Springs South graduate and the reigning DiRenna Award winner — cracked the starting lineup in a 39-point exhibition win last Friday against Missouri Western.

“I’m really excited to get our first regular-season game under our belts, and I really like the direction that this team is headed,” Puryear said. The game against Missouri Western “was a really nice glimpse of what we can do this season.”

Led by Phillips, Walton and junior Wes Clark, who is back from a season-ending elbow injury suffered last February, Missouri pushed the pace in that victory — a trend it hopes will carry through the season.

The Tigers scored 59 second-half points, which is as many or more than MU managed in 13 games last season.

Phillips, for one, expects to win against Wofford College, which is in Spartanburg, S.C. He hopes the Tigers can get off to another fast start, especially on defense, as they did in the exhibition victory.

Missouri also had a closed scrimmage against Creighton a few weeks ago in preparation for the season.

The Wofford game is “a big test for us first, and I think that having played Creighton is definitely going to help,” senior center Ryan Rosburg said.

The Tigers made changes at practice after that scrimmage with the Bluejays, going harder and playing faster. Those adjustments paid dividends in the exhibition game, but that came against a Division II squad.

Doing it against a tourney-caliber squad in a game that counts would mean a great deal more.

“We really want to start off on a great note, and we don’t want anybody to relive last season at all, so we’re going to try to win as many games as possible,” Puryear said.

It’s been a challenging week on Missouri’s campus with protests, the prospect of violence and the resignations of high-ranking administrators.

“I’m not going to lie,” Phillips said. “It was a little hard mentally trying to stay focused on this upcoming game this Friday against Wofford. Seeing everything on campus, it was kind of hard to stay focused, but we’ve got to get through it. That’s the way life is sometimes.”

Playing Wofford just might provide a welcome respite — for the players and the community.

“I think it would be a huge confidence-booster, knowing that we’re playing a great team, a team that was in the tournament last year,” Rosburg said. “Basically, to just get off to a good start unlike last year, when it was uphill after the first game — we don’t want to put ourselves in that kind of hole.”

This story was originally published November 12, 2015 at 7:10 PM with the headline "Missouri faces tough basketball opener against tourney-tested Wofford."