Trailing by five points with less than 90 seconds to play, Missouri employed a full-court press. The last-ditch effort appeared to restore hope for the Tigers when Xavier Pinson got a steal, tipping the ball to Dru Smith, who made a layup and drew a foul on Jalen Harris. Smith hit the free throw for Missouri’s fifth point in nine seconds, cutting Arkansas’ lead to one possession with 1:17 to play.
The hope was short-lived. Playing in his first game since Feb. 1 after undergoing knee surgery, Arkansas sophomore Isaiah Joe pulled up, with a defender’s hand in his face, from about 23 feet on the other end. As Cuonzo Martin said after the game, it was “the type of shot that makes a coach go ‘ehh.’”
No matter. Joe sunk the three, his fifth of the game, to give Arkansas a six-point lead and effectively put the game out of reach. The Razorbacks avenged a loss from Feb. 8 in Mizzou Arena with a 78-68 win over Missouri.
Two weeks ago, it was the Missouri backcourt, led by a breakout performance from Pinson, who controlled the game. Pinson and Smith attacked the basket at will, combining to score 35 points, then carried the strategy over to the Tigers’ next three games — two wins and a close loss at LSU.
Saturday, however, Arkansas flipped the script. Even though Mason Jones, the SEC’s leading scorer, scored just 12 points on 2-9 shooting, the Razorbacks ended a five-game losing streak thanks to the backcourt combo of Joe and Desi Sills. The duo frustrated Missouri’s ball-handlers on defense and combined to score 38 points on the other end.
Joe’s presence was the most obvious difference between the two matchups. Arkansas lost all five games when he was out of the lineup and shot 31.0 percent from three-point range during that span. Not only did Joe make five of 10 tries from deep Saturday, Arkansas tied its season-high in three-pointers as a team, making 12 of 25. Arkansas coach Eric Musselman said Joe not only can knock down threes himself, he creates more open looks for others. Martin called his shooting stroke “probably the best in America.”
“They’re a different team (with Joe),” Martin said. “He’s a good player. He’s an all-league guy. When it’s all said and done, he’ll play for 15 years. ... Not many guys can shoot the ball like that.”
Sills, too, shot well from behind the arc, making four of six three-pointers. While Martin credited him for knocking down the shots, he and his players blamed themselves for allowing Arkansas so many open looks.
“We have to do a better job of making (Joe) work for baskets,” Martin said. “Same way for Desi. Desi played well. He made three threes on our breakdowns, but he made them.”
“We just gotta do a better job of running them off the line,” said Pinson.
On the other end of the floor, Pinson and Smith scored 15 points apiece, but Arkansas made them work for it. Pinson, who had shot a ridiculous 76 percent from the past two games, came back to earth a bit, making just five of 13 field goals and shooting one of eight from three-point range. Smith shot six of 14 and missed both of his attempts from deep. The duo combined for eight turnovers.
Musselman said keeping Pinson and Smith out of the paint — and off the free throw line — was a top priority entering the game. Pinson and Smith combined to shoot 17 of 19 from the line two weeks ago, and Missouri attempted 44 free throws as a team. Saturday, the starting backcourt attempted 10 free throws and the Tigers as a whole shot 20.
“We packed the paint as much as we could and didn’t want to give them seams to get to the basket,” Musselman said. “They were a focal point of our scouting report, for sure, the last few days. They’re both really good, they’re both high-volume free throw attempt players, but again, that goal-line defense of not putting them on the foul line 44 times was something that was really important to us, something we talked about every day, because we cut their FTA’s in half tonight.”
Missouri’s offense looked crisp to start the game, as the Tigers jumped out to a 24-11 lead in the game’s first 10 minutes. But after Musselman used his second timeout of the game to yell at his players, Arkansas locked in on the defensive end. With center Jeremiah Tilmon dressed but sitting out for the 12th time in 13 games, the undersized Razorbacks managed to limit Missouri’s frontcourt players — Reed Nikko, Mitchell Smith and Parker Braun — to a combined eight points and five rebounds in 40 minutes. Martin said Missouri needed to do a better job of exploiting mismatches against Arkansas, which features just one player taller than 6-foot-6 in its regular rotation.
“We have to do a better job of that, when they switch, getting the ball to our bigs, like we did in the second half with Reed, and force them to make decisions,” Martin said. “So if you want to switch with a smaller guy, we have to make them pay. And we didn’t do that in the stretch run.”
Meanwhile, Arkansas continued to defend the three-point line well. Arkansas entered Saturday leading the nation in three-point defense at 25.5 percent, and that trend continued, with Missouri hitting just four of 21 three-pointers. The Tigers shot 1-10 from deep in the second half.
“I thought they did a good job of having guys kind of waiting for us in the paint,” Dru Smith said. “As we were getting downhill, they did a good job of kind of sneaking in and making us kick it and then running guys off the line at the same time.”
Missouri led for 17:49 in the first half, but Arkansas seized the lead in the final seconds before the break. The Tigers then trailed for all of the final 20 minutes. Four times in the last 10 minutes, Missouri cut the Arkansas lead to two points. Each time, either Sills or Joe answered with a three-pointer. Missouri is now winless in eight road games during conference play.
“I thought we had a lot of breakdowns,” Martin said. “Though the energy was there, we had a lot of breakdowns defensively. It’s hard when you’re on the road. … We won the game at home, we still had breakdowns.”
