The honeymoon ended on Wednesday night.
No, this isn’t me calling for Cuonzo Martin’s job or anything similarly idiotic, so settle down. But for the past ten months, it’s just been this everlasting joy ride for Mizzou fans. The highs were so high and the lows, well, they hurt, but they were just so much less frequent than they’ve been the last three years.
Even when Missouri got blown out at Utah, even when it blew some late leads and lost opportunities, it was fun just to care again. They weren’t there yet, but they were so much damn closer.
But then the shine of everything being new and happy wore off and Missouri fans started to have more than just hope. They started to have some expectations. Yeah, this could be a tournament team. You know what? Maybe it should be a tournament team.
And then Wednesday night happened. Auburn, the SEC’s biggest surprise, came into Mizzou Arena and blew the Tigers out, 91-73. Missouri hung around for a while, drawing within one at 49-48. Kassius Robertson made it 54-52 Auburn with a pair of free throws. The visiting Tigers then scored 20 of the next 22 points.
“We just completely lost control,” Jordan Barnett said. “It just all fell apart right there. We’ve just got to learn to stay with it. We can’t let one mistake turn into two or three.”
Losses happen. But this seemed like more than a loss. Auburn exposed every one of Missouri’s weaknesses. And there are quite a few.
Jeremiah Tilmon had two fouls in two minutes at halftime. In the second half, he matched that, picking up four fouls in his first four minutes of court time. He fouled out in just seven.
“Why not?” Martin quipped when asked why he left Tilmon in after a quick third foul early in the second half. “You knew the end result, so why not? At some point, you’ve got to play and go through it. That’s why I kept him out there because he’s got to learn and get through it.
“It’s not the officiating. It’s him growing and getting better.”
With Tilmon on the bench, Jontay Porter floated through a second consecutive mostly ineffective game. He was better than he was on Saturday at Texas A&M and did manage to collect eight rebounds, but also had three turnovers and attempted five shots—just two of them inside the three-point line against a team that has no one on the roster taller than 6-foot-8.
“The young guys, they’ll get where they need to get to,” Martin said. “In Jontay’s case, as skilled as he is, he’s never really been a guy that’s been around the rim like that as you can see. That’s the next part of his game, learning how to score around the rim.”
Kevin Puryear was as aggressive as he’s been in quite some time. But he’s just limited athletically and couldn’t get many shots over smaller Auburn defenders. When he did get them high enough, they mostly didn’t go in, as he finished 2-for-9. Give Puryear this, though: He found his way to the free throw line eight times. Meanwhile, despite Auburn being at six fouls by the 12 minute mark of each half, the rest of his teammates attempted only 14 free throws the entire night. Auburn went to the line 26 times and made 23 of them.
“We felt like we had an advantage around the rim, but we didn’t,” Martin said.
Barnett tried to keep Missouri in it, scoring 14 of his 19 before halftime. Jordan Geist had ten in the first half and Kassius Robertson scored 19 of his after the break--many when the game was mostly decided--though neither played what should be viewed as a standout game. They got the vast majority of minutes at the two guard positions and combined for five of Missouri’s 20 turnovers, a too-high, but also much-too-normal, total.
So Missouri got an above average night from only one of its top six players in the rotation. But here’s where we get to the real problem: Martin only has those six players (and one of them can’t stay on the floor).
Terrence Phillips committed two turnovers and missed two shots in seven minutes in the first half (he did have three assists). He did not see the floor in the second half until the Tigers were down 17 with less than three minutes to go. Cullen VanLeer had four turnovers in five minutes at halftime, trying but failing to match Tilmon’s foul-per-minute ratio. Reed Nikko, forced into 17 minutes of action by Tilmon’s foul-fest, had two points and five rebounds, but missed the front end of two one-and-ones and was unable to finish around the basket against Auburn.
“When you’re in the first year, you’re going to go through some things,” Martin said. “It is what it is right now. You’re talking year two, three, four, now that’s a difference. But it is what it is right now.”
It’s a long way of saying Wednesday was very ugly. And ugly games happen. Sometimes two ugly games happen in a row. But this one was eye-opening in that it exposed Missouri’s weaknesses as potentially fatal.
The Tigers don’t take care of the ball. Their big men either can’t stay on the floor or can’t finish around the rim. There is no shame in being less athletic than Auburn, but when the game sped up, Mizzou was way out of its comfort zone. If Barnett and Robertson aren’t raining threes, this team has trouble scoring. And on Wednesday the defense that had been there all season long abandoned them.
"We don't have enough offensively to win games there," Geist said. "We've got to bring it defensively."
Missouri could shut me up quickly. They probably have to win seven more games to make the NCAA Tournament. There are winnable games on the schedule. In the SEC, every game seems winnable.
And, of course, there’s the thing you hope for, the thing you whisper about, but the thing that nobody wants to discuss out loud just yet. They have an all-American and a lottery pick languishing on the bench recovering from back surgery who could make a whole lot of these problems seem a lot less serious than they seemed on Wednesday night.
Michael Porter Jr. could change a lot about this team. But it’s been without him all year. It will be without him for the foreseeable future. And it’s probably going to have to win some games while he finishes healing to entice him to come back when and if he is healthy enough to do so. Short of Porter ignoring medical advice and shedding his Mizzou polo for a Superman cape in the next ten days or so, Missouri's got to find a way to put together a run in early February or the Tigers could find the games aren’t important enough for Porter to play in even if he’s physically able to do so.
“We’ve just got to stick together,” Barnett said. “A lot of us have been through some rough times together. We know how to stick together and that’s all we can do.
“This is a much better team than last year and we still have a chance to do really well.”
They’ve shown they can do it this year. They’ve played with West Virginia and Florida, beaten Tennessee and South Carolina. When they’re good, they’re good enough. But good enough sure was tough to see on Wednesday night.
