Following Missouri’s win over Vanderbilt on Saturday, sophomore center Jeremiah Tilmon smiled as he held court in front of a dozen or so members of the media. Tilmon drew laughs as he described his full-court, one-handed heave near the end of the first half, which ultimately sent the basketball sailing over the backboard of Missouri’s basket before the buzzer sounded. He joked that he could have played football with that arm strength.
Tilmon’s performance against the Commodores put him in the cheerful mood. He scored 19 points and grabbed eight rebounds in what head coach Cuonzo Martin called “his best effort since he’s been in this program at playing against the double.” Perhaps most importantly, Tilmon didn’t foul out of the game, tying a career high by playing 35 minutes.
Both on the court and off it, Tilmon looks more comfortable than he’s been since before Christmas. That’s resulted from his ability to avoid fouls and stay on the floor. Tilmon has now played 26 or more minutes in six consecutive games — the longest such streak of his college career. He’s topped eight points in all of those games and scored at least 14 in four. After the Vanderbilt game, he called the streak the best of his college career.
Missouri will need Tilmon to elevate his play even further Tuesday night as it travels to Knoxville for a rematch against No. 1 Tennessee. Martin isn’t shy about acknowledging Tilmon’s importance to the Tiger offense.
“He’s a guy that demands a double-team,” Martin said on Monday’s SEC coaches’ teleconference. “I’d be hard-pressed to find a lot of teams that will play him one-on-one through the course of a whole game and he’s not very productive. ... We’re a different team when he’s on the floor, because he can make things happen for us and he allows our shooters to get open looks.”
The last time Missouri and Tennessee met, it was perhaps the lowest point in a dismal three-game stretch for Tilmon. He collected five fouls, including a technical foul, in just nine minutes. He scored three points and grabbed one rebound as Missouri was outscored 40-24 in the paint. Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said after the game that the complexion of the contest changed when Tilmon went to the bench with two fouls in the first half.
“That changed for sure what they wanted to do with our team,” Barnes said.
That Jan. 8 matchup was the second of three straight games in which Tilmon played 13 or fewer minutes before fouling out. In the three games combined, he contributed 11 points and three rebounds in 34 minutes. After each contest, Martin seemed at a loss for answers about how to keep his biggest post presence on the floor.
Martin believes Tilmon’s improvement in the month since is due, at least in part, to simply learning from that experience.
“Everybody goes at their own pace and they learn at their own time,” Martin said. “I think often times big guys in high school rarely get a chance to go against big guys on a day to day basis, so you don’t really know what that feels like.”
Tilmon attributed his improvement to two factors. For one, he’s viewing the game less as an individual competition between himself and the opposing center. Martin has identified that as an area of concern for Tilmon in the past, such as when he fouled out against Arkansas on Jan. 23 while trying to match the production of Razorback big man Daniel Gafford.
“I deal bad with embarrassment, so I feel like if someone scores on me, he’s embarrassing me,” Tilmon said. “ So I have to get over that. I’m going to be scored on. And that was my problem, that was why I was too busy fouling.”
Tilmon also said he’s taken more accountability for his fouls. In the past, his instinct has been to blame the officials after fouling out. He realized doing so didn’t allow him to learn from his mistakes and avoid making similar fouls in the future.
“I was talking to myself, like man, the refs are picking on me,” Tilmon said. “But I had to look myself in the mirror and tell myself it was me. So ever since then, I just feel like it’s changed.”
Tilmon will face a stiff challenge Tuesday. Not only will he have to match up against Tennessee’s imposing frontline of Grant Williams and Kyle Alexander, who have combined to average 29.1 points and 14.7 rebounds per game this season, but Barnes said Monday that frustrating Tilmon will be a key aspect of his team’s defensive strategy.
“We’ve always thought he was a big part of what they do, and when he is playing well, he really opens it up for those other guys, too,” Barnes said of Tilmon. “So again we respect him a lot and know that we’re going to have to do a different job, and we’ve tried to show him different defenses because we just don’t want him to get settled in, because he can really, truly affect the game in a big, big way if you let him really get going.”
Martin doesn’t expect Tilmon to suddenly play 35 minutes every outing. After the Vanderbilt game, a reporter noted that questions about Tilmon have shifted to being about what he’s doing well rather than his foul rate, and Martin quipped, “you’ll ask (about fouls) again.” He called Tilmon “a work in progress.”
But with his recent play, Tilmon has provided hope that, moving forward, games like Missouri’s first matchup against Tennessee will be the exception. To compete in the SEC, the Tigers need his last three games, in which he’s averaged 16.3 points and 6.3 rebounds per game, to be closer to the norm. And even when he isn’t filling up the stat sheet, Tilmon tries to keep in mind that he doesn’t have to outscore the opposing center for Missouri to win. His most important ability, he knows, is availability.
“If I’m fouling, I’m on the bench and that don’t help the team at all,” Tilmon said. “So when I’m on the court and I’m not fouling, even when I’m not scoring, I feel like I’m still being productive and effective on defense, so I feel like it’s still helping the team out.”
