Mizzou finds mojo just in time to avoid disastrous loss to SEMO
COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Missouri found its most reliable keys to success so far this season just in time to avoid another embarrassing loss Tuesday night at Mizzou Arena.
Yet another slow start appeared to set the Tigers on course for disaster against an athletic-but-limited Southeast Missouri team that easily could have pulled off the upset if it had simply made a reasonable percentage of its free throws. Instead, Mizzou picked up its defense and hit some unlikely 3-pointers before holding off the Redhawks for a 65-61 win.
"We have such a long way to go as a team," Anderson said. "You can't play like we played. You're not going to win very many games if you play like that."
Defense must be the strength of a team without enough offensive weapons, at least until some of its younger players learn to be more assertive and willing to become primary scoring options. More pressure and six SEMO turnovers in the final 12 minutes made a comeback possible as the Redhawks made just one field goal in nearly six minutes before a pair of desperation 3-pointers in the final minute cut the lead to two on back-to-back possessions.
But Keith Shamburger's guarded 3-pointer with 17 seconds left allowed Tramaine Isabell to ice the game at the free-throw line and capped off a rather remarkable display of outside shooting for a team hitting 35 percent in its first six games. Just like when the Tigers hit eight of nine from beyond the arc in the second half to pull away for a 78-64 win over Oral Roberts, they made six of seven in the final 14 minutes to rally and hold off the Redhawks, much to the surprise of SEMO coach Dickey Nutt.
"I thought we started out in a man, it was pretty good," Nutt said. "I thought zone was good, but there at the end they just got loose a little bit ... and they hit a couple shots on us that just really buried us."
None was more important than the first career 3-pointer from D'Angelo Allen, who had no other choice when he got the ball at the top of the arc with just two seconds on the shot clock. Not long after SEMO had provided two answers to Mizzou's comebacks to tie the game, the freshman scored his only points of the night to give the Tigers their first lead with less than four minutes left.
It would be unfair to overlook the importance of a strong second half from Johnathan Williams III, who scored 12 of his 18 points and grabbed eight of his 11 rebounds after halftime to finish with Missouri's first double-double of the season. But the 3-point shooting put the Tigers over the top, and the defense made plays to get the critical stops it hadn't gotten early in the game.
Southeast Missouri's Jarekious Bradley opened the scoring with a layup seven seconds after the opening tip, and the Redhawks would find more success before the Tigers finally closed off the driving lanes. That led to openings on the perimeter, where SEMO knocked down three straight 3-pointers during a four-minute Mizzou scoring drought to stretch the lead to 30-19.
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"I thought tonight we let them drive by us way too much," Anderson said. "We're trying to play a very aggressive style of defense without a lot of tricks, and in the second half we kind of changed some things up a little bit on their guys and it helped us."
Anderson indefinitely suspended sophomore guard Wes Clark for a violation of team policy, and the Tigers badly missed his defensive presence on the perimeter. In the game's first 28 minutes, Missouri forced only three turnovers and came away with one steal, fewer than Clark's team-best average of 2.5 per game.
SEMO's J.J. Thompson said he and his fellow guards found they could get into the lane and create offense nearly at will, and even the 6-foot point guard made it all the way to the rim on multiple occasions. But Mizzou found a way to thwart those drives in the final 10 minutes, with Ryan Rosburg playing some huge help defense during an 8-0 run and Allen taking a critical charge to nullify a game-tying basket from Josh Langford with 2:30 remaining.
Shortly after that play, the Tigers got two of their four steals for the night in the backcourt in a 36-second span down the stretch, with the second leading to two free throws from Montaque Gill-Caesar to stretch Mizzou's lead to five for the first time. Shamburger said he made an effort to play more aggressively and started picking up the Redhawks fullcourt later in the game, when the Tigers refused to give up and suffer a repeat of their 69-61 season-opening loss to Missouri-Kansas City.
"The last 10 minutes, I think that was our best play when we locked down our defenders and we just had to keep going," Shamburger said. "We got our offensive points in the transition game and once we got in transition we started getting stops, we started winning."
It's a lesson the Tigers would do well to implement earlier in games going forward.
You can follow Luke Thompson on Twitter at @FS_LukeT or email him at lukegthompson87@gmail.com.
