Missouri entered Wednesday night’s SEC-opening matchup with as much buzz as the program has seen in at least three years, and maybe since 2012. The No. 12 Tigers looked to keep their record perfect and prove they belonged in the SEC title conversation against No. 7 Tennessee, the only team ranked higher in the conference. Even with just 3,164 fans in attendance, Mizzou Arena hummed with excitement prior to the opening tip.
The buzz lasted about eight minutes. Tennessee made its first seven shots from the field while Missouri started two-of-11. The Tigers went nearly six minutes without scoring a basket, and by the time the drought ended, Tennessee had taken a commanding 21-4 lead. The Tigers would never get closer than 12 in a 73-53 beatdown.
Below is our full post-game report, starting with five things we learned from the matchup.
* The shooting woes Missouri overcame in its win over Bradley might not have been a fluke. In that game, Missouri pulled out a 54-53 win despite shooting just 25.4 percent from the field and 14.3 percent from behind the three-point arc. Wednesday, the Tigers shot just about as poorly. This time, against a far more talented opponent, the score got lopsided in a hurry.
Missouri made 36 of 44 field goals against Tennessee: 36.4 percent. The Tigers converted just three of 16 three-pointers. The shooting struggles even extended to the free throw line, where Missouri has generally been solid across the past two seasons. The Tigers missed 12 free throws on 30 attempts.
Tennessee's defense certainly had a lot to do with the poor shooting. The Volunteers entered Wednesday ranked fourth nationally in defensive efficiency and first in scoring defense. But Cuonzo Martin and his players said Missouri should have done a better job of moving around against the long, athletic Volunteers.
“We can’t get stagnant," point guard Dru Smith said. "We can’t get caught ball-watching. Even if someone is kind of making a one-on-one play, there still has to be movement on the back side. I think a lot of the times, especially tonight, we got caught watching, just watching guys go try and make plays, and then if they get stuck, they have no outlet, everybody’s just kind of standing around. So just making sure that we have player movement and ball movement all at the same time, I think that’s what we need to do.”
On the year, Missouri is not shooting just 43.8 percent from the field and a dismal 27.3 percent from three-point range. That three-point shooting percentage clocks in at No. 292 out of 332 teams who have played a game so far this season.
Speaking to the media earlier this week, Martin expressed confidence that the outside shooting would improve. After the game, he said he still wants his players to be confident shooting from three-point range, but the shot selection has to be better, too.
“You have to take clean shots and you have to shoot them with confidence," Martin said. "I think when you’re taking jabs and hesitant on shots, that’s when those become tough three-point shots. And then, again, you have to drive the ball. You don’t have to settle for three-point shots."
* The starts of each half sunk Missouri. Despite the early deficit, the game wasn’t completely decided by halftime. Missouri trailed by just 13 at the break. But the first eight minutes of the second half looked a lot like the start of the game. Missouri made its first field goal of the period but wouldn’t score for another four-and-a-half minutes. During the first seven minutes of the second half, Missouri turned the ball over eight times, committed six fouls and scored just five points.
That led to a lot of easy scoring opportunities for Tennessee, and the Vols took advantage. They outscored the Tigers 23-8 to start the second half, extending their lead to 28 points and effectively ending the game.
Martin said he and his staff saw some of these issues coming prior to Wednesday. Several times this season, the Tiger offense has started slowly out of the gates. Once again, Martin pointed to a lack of movement as the root issue.
“The first five minutes, we have to do a better job of moving the basketball, getting it from one side of the floor and executing what we’re trying to do, especially in transition," Martin said. "Not just in set plays, but in transition, doing the things we practice and doing the things that we do when we’re playing well.”
On the other end of the floor, he simply tipped his cap to Tennessee. Martin didn't express issue with his team's energy level or defense early in the game, but said the Volunteers simply knocked down tough shot after tough shot.
“They hit some tough shots coming out of the gates," senior Drew Buggs said. "We played some good defense, they just hit some tough shots, and that’s how it goes in league play.
* Missouri has struggled with turnovers at times during Martin’s tenure, but for most of this season, the Tigers had done a pretty good job taking care of the ball. Missouri entered Wednesday averaging 12.5 giveaways per game and had yet to turn the ball over 20 times in a single outing.
That changed in a hurry against Tennessee’s active defense. Missouri turned the ball over a whopping 21 times on 68 possessions. That number could have been higher, too — the Tigers didn't turn the ball over in the final six minutes as Tennessee dialed back its defensive intensity.
Not only is that turnover rate of 30.9 percent far and away the highest this season for Missouri, the team has only turned the ball over more frequently three previous times since Martin took over as head coach prior to 2017-18. At one point in the second half, the Tigers gave the ball away on four possessions in a row.
Martin pointed out that some of Missouri's turnover issues had to do with Tennessee’s defense. The Volunteers have forced turnovers at a 25.9-percent clip on the season, 12th-best in the nation. However, Missouri had plenty of self-inflicted errors, as well. The sloppy offense erased any chance the Tigers might have had to overcome their early deficit, especially given the team’s shooting woes.
“I think you gotta give them credit, they’re a good defensive team, but I think we also had a lot of unforced turnovers as well," Smith said. "I know myself, I know I had several of them. So I think it’s more on us just making the simple, easy plays more than it is anything else.”
* It’s time to question whether this is just a slump for Mark Smith. The senior guard looked like Missouri’s best offensive player through the first four games of the season. He shot better than 50 percent from three-point range (13 of 25) while averaging 17.3 points per game. The past three games, however, he’s failed to eclipse 10 points. Smith has averaged just seven points per contest and shot 1-7 from three during that span.
Against Tennessee, the problem wasn’t that Smith didn’t shoot well, it’s that he hardly shot the ball at all. Smith attempted just one field goal in the first half and two in the game. He didn’t attempt a three-pointer. Meanwhile, he turned the ball over three times.
"It’s our job to put him in position where he’s driving the ball, whether he’s coming off ball screens, making plays, we’re running him off screens to get shots," Martin said of Mark Smith. "... It’s some of those areas we talk about him in practice, his position to be ready to shoot basketballs, especially in transition, being shot-ready and looking for those opportunities. But I think it’s more us as a staff trying to get him better opportunities to score the ball, or at least get shots.”
We’ve seen Smith peter out after strong starts the past two seasons, but he’s also battled injury both years. He’s apparently healthy now, having played at least 27 minutes in every game, but he’s still struggled to impact the past three. Missouri will need to get him going as it moves further into league play.
* The schedule gets easier from here, but only slightly. Missouri travels to Arkansas on Saturday. The Razorbacks won at Auburn on Wednesday to improve to 9-0.
Martin, however, thinks the quick turnaround could actually be a good thing for Missouri. The Tigers have had more than a week off prior to each of their past two games and have performed poorly. Plus, Martin pointed out that having another game in three days will force his players to move past their first loss of this season in a hurry.
“The great thing about league play, it turns around quick, so you don’t have a lot of time to sulk about it," Martin said. "Some of the things we saw coming, and hopefully we can get these things corrected. And like I said before, in league play, your margin for error is slim, and some of those things, we paid for tonight, and we gotta get them corrected.”
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT: There's a lot, but the most glaring is the shooting. Missouri has now shot 11-for-58 from three-point range across the past three games. That's 19 percent. The lack of an outside shooting threat not only makes the odds of overcoming an early deficit like the Tigers faced Wednesday much more difficult, it allows defenses to clog the paint and take away any easy opportunities around the rim. Missouri converted just seven of 17 layups against Tennessee. That had much more to do with the Vols having multiple defenders around the rim than the Tigers blowing easy opportunities. Finding at least some semblance of an outside threat would help alleviate some of that interior congestion.
“I think we can get it fixed," Dru Smith said of the outside shooting. "I think we’re just going to have to stay in the gym, just keep getting shots up, and making sure that we’re ready to shoot out there.”
STAR OF THE GAME: Certainly no one from Missouri qualifies, so we'll take a moment to highlight Tennessee senior Yves Pons. Pons isn't a three-point shooting threat, and at 6-foot-6, he's a bit undersized for a power forward, but he made his presence felt on both ends of the floor Wednesday. Pons scored 13 points on five-of-nine shooting, including a couple impressive fadeaway jumpers and some highlight-reel dunks. He was credited with four blocks on the defensive end, but it seemed like more. Pons finished the game plus-25 in the scoring margin while playing a game-high 30 minutes.
WHAT IT MEANS: It's not time to panic about Missouri's NCAA Tournament chances or long-term trajectory quite yet, by any means. But any talk about Missouri potentially winning the SEC needs to stop. The Tigers looked completely out-classed by Tennessee. Now, the Volunteers are a very good team, possibly a Final Four caliber team. This game also unfolded about as poorly as possible for Missouri with the early deficit. But it's impossible to have watched Wednesday's matchup and come away feeling like Missouri deserves to be talked about as an SEC title contender, or to be ranked in the top 15.
QUOTABLE: “I think the first five minutes, we didn’t do a good job with ball movement, getting the ball from one side of the floor to the other and then downhill. I thought it was kind of holding, holding, dribble, and then let’s try to make a play. And that’s something we’ve been talking about, really even in the six wins, we’ve got to do a better job of moving the ball the first five minutes, getting downhill, keeping what we do in practice, and we didn’t do a good job of that.” -- Cuonzo Martin
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