No. 21 Mizzou hoops works on self-scouting ahead of the SEC Tournament
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
The slate has officially been wiped clean for college basketball teams across the nation, as the madness that is March has arrived.
Before gearing up for the NCAA Tournament, teams are looking to boost their standing in conference tournament action. No. 21 Mizzou hoops will hope to make a run in the SEC Tournament in Nashville this week, especially after going 0-3 in the final stretch of the regular season.
Despite three-straight losses to end the year, the Tigers still finished 10-8 in conference play and tied for sixth in the Southeastern Conference. Due to a tiebreaker, MU will play in the conference tourney as the No. 7 seed, beginning on Thursday, March 13. Head coach Dennis Gates and company will either face LSU or Mississippi State in the second round, depending on Wednesday night's results.
Gates said, at this point in the year, it's all about self-scouting, since you won't find out your opponent until about 24 hours before you play them in Nashville.
"What we want to do is, obviously, concentrate on ourselves, then get into that atmosphere, do an unbelievable shooting session...and then you have to do your prep," he said. "We'll find out, you know, Wednesday who we play. Until then, you look at certain things, you try to implement and go back to the game plan. So, what I've done is I've looked at our scouting reports and stuff from LSU, I've scouted them over the weekend, I've scouted Mississippi State, now what common denominator from an offensive standpoint do I deliver to my team that's in common and defensively, the same thing. That's what you work on. The next part of that is now getting to the next level of that scouting report."
You can watch the full press conference with Coach Gates in the video player below.
Mizzou's head coach said through self-assessment, one of the biggest thing for MU to key in on is being able to keep teams off the free-throw line.
The way the whistle blows is, undoubtedly, going to be a major part of Mizzou's, and any team's, run in the postseason. Gates said his group needs to adjust better in-game based on which officials are there in the SEC Tournament, as his team now has a good idea of how each ref blows their whistle.
"This is going to be postseason play. I want you to think about last year. Last year in the NCAA Tournament, our teams got in foul trouble. We, as a conference, have to clean that up. So, you may see it being cleaned up in this postseason and we have to continue to get better to give ourselves a chance and to succeed...We'll probably see that on display, no matter how long the games take, it just has to be done a certain way because postseason, it can haunt you," Gates said.
Mizzou guard Caleb Grill said the Tigers are going about the postseason with the same preparation they've had for any other game.
"It's a little bit different because you have to do two preparations at once...but, regardless, we've played both teams twice, you can go back and watch what you've learned from those two games...[LSU and Mississippi State] are different [from when we last played them], but throughout the season, we've also watched them play. So, we've just got to remember what was successful when we played against them and see how other teams have had success against them these last couple weeks," Grill said.
You can watch the full press conference with Grill in the video player below.
It'll help that Mizzou will enter the SEC Tournament field with the conference's Sixth Man of the Year on their side: Grill, himself. When asked what that honor meant to him, he, unsurprisingly, made it all about the team's success this season, not his.
Gates said he admires the way that Grill accepted that the lineup was going to be changed, without him as a starter, early on in the season. However, it wasn't a path he automatically accepted, as he had to grow into his role off the bench.
"It was a path that we saw a different response to his level of focus, his specific stats and at that point, you don't want to disrupt the rhythm," Gates said. "That rhythm went from the Memphis game, when he started, to the Howard University game when he first came off the bench. From that point on, it was a role that I truly believe shows his level of maturity, his level of acceptance, his team's level of understanding and he just basically grew into that role. He accepted it and therefore the byproduct of you fully accepting a role, that you may not have agreed upon, leads to you being voted...Sixth Man of the Year. I'm proud of him."
