Missouri won a basketball game on Saturday afternoon. Against a high major opponent. The Tigers beat Utah 83-75 on the strength of Kobe Brown’s 27-point effort in their first win in three tries against a team from a major conference.
But Utah’s only 7-4 and they haven’t beaten anybody any good, you say. But Utah’s best player, Branden Carlsen didn’t play, you say. But Mizzou still lost to UMKC and got blown out by Liberty and didn’t show up for the Border War, you say.
So what?
I’m not going to try to make this into some tide-turning, season-changing event. Missouri’s going to have to do this more than once to erase much of what I saw for the first ten games of the season. The Tigers still can’t really shoot (4-for-21 from three-point range on Saturday and just 24.5% for the season). Carlsen might have offered up more resistance in the paint and given the Utes some sort of chance to slow down Brown, who scored 12 consecutive points for the Tigers at one point and got the ball in the lane on seemingly every second half possession.
But, again, so what?
If you haven’t eaten in a week, you’re not going to turn down a sandwich because it has mustard instead of mayo. Wins haven’t been all that plentiful for this team. It doesn’t matter how they come.
“It’s important just to get that energy,” Javon Pickett said. “Just to get some type of motion going forward going to this next practice tomorrow leading up to the Illinois game with positive energy.”
There’s no such thing as a bad win, especially when they’ve been few and far between. But Saturday also served as an example that the complete burial of the season has probably been a little bit premature. That’s not to say Missouri found some secret recipe that’s going to lead to a miraculous turnaround and the NCAA Tournament. But the talk of not winning another game all year was always hyperbolic.
College basketball is a volatile sport. Nobody’s gone unbeaten since 1976. Missouri has only won fewer than ten games twice since 1967. Good teams have off days and bad teams have good days. In 2019-20, the last full season of college hoops, 49 of the country’s 358 Division One teams finished with single digit victories. Of those 49, only two (Nebraska and Northwestern) played in a high-major conference.
Missouri already has six wins. Odds are they’re going to find a few more. Because—and I know this will come as a shock to those who didn’t watch or who have convinced themselves that the only fix is to burn everything down—Missouri actually looked a fair amount better on Saturday against the Utes.
Utah isn’t a great team, but it isn’t a terrible one either. The Utes came in ranked 76th on KenPom. SMU, for what it’s worth, is 75th. So, no, Mizzou isn’t great. But it’s probably not nearly as bad as it’s looked for the first month-plus of the season either. It’s capable of playing with other high major teams, which it hadn’t done in its first two opportunities.
“I think our week of practice, we did a good job addressing things, improving things,” Cuonzo Martin said. “It feels good to win. I think it’s important that you win. As a coach, there are areas we have to continue to improve and get better, but I’m happy to see the guys win.”
In addition, the Tigers actually made some adjustments that should offer a ray of hope on Saturday. At halftime, Missouri trailed 33-32. The Tigers had taken 16 three-pointers and made only two. I asked Martin if he told the team to stop shooting threes at halftime.
“When they’re wide open shoot it,” Martin said. “That means if there’s nobody on the floor at all.”
Martin said Utah’s defense resembles the pack line defense where they back everyone into the paint and allow the opponent to get looks from three-point range.
“I told the guys if they’re backed up, drive,” Martin said. “Drive the ball, force them to foul.”
After the break, Mizzou attempted just five threes and made two of them, including one by Boogie Coleman that put Missouri up five and basically iced the game with 32 seconds to go. In lieu of shooting jumpers, the Tigers were driving the lane and pounding the ball to Brown, who scored 23 of his 27 points after the break and attempted only 11 field goals on the game, including only one three-pointer. The Tigers were 15-for-28 from two-point range, scored 18 points in the paint and another 19 at the free throw line.
“He said don’t settle for threes,” Amari Davis said. “Get in the paint, get to the free throw line.”
“The bigs were doing a great job of screening which led the guards to get downhill, make layups, pass out, whatever,” Pickett added.
A crowd that was sparse at the beginning filled in and may have been pretty close to the 6,700 that was announced. When Missouri took its first second-half lead at 43-41 on a jumper by Davis, there was a noticeable reaction. Those in attendance stood for the final 90 seconds or so as the Tigers closed out their most impressive win of the year so far.
A sign of things to come? They’ll need to prove it a few more times before anybody should be convinced of that. But it’s at least a sign they’re capable of playing competent basketball and avoiding an historically bad season while maybe even giving us something to talk about other than a death march to an expensive buyout in March. Maybe we ought to at least let the season play out before authoring definitive judgment.
“You just grow into it,” Martin said. “Sometimes you have to go through it. We have talented guys.”
Sign up today and get all the news with a premium subscription.
Talk about this story and more in The Tigers' Lair
Make sure you're caught up on all the Tiger news and headlines
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for video and live streaming coverage
