What Picking Up Win Over Alabama Would Do for LSU Basketball

The end of the regular season is finally here for the 2022 LSU basketball team, one that's seen this group climb to the top of the mountain only to steadily decline with every passing loss.

This was a group that in January had high hopes for a top end seed in the NCAA tournament only to lose nine of its final 14 games leading into Saturday's finale against Alabama. But this is also a group that recently feels like it's getting back to that early season standard. Coach Will Wade called it "rounding the corner" after a competitive but ultimately disappointing finish to the Arkansas game.

Senior forward Darius Days believes the Tigers are "getting back into rhythm" as senior day and the regular season finale against the Crimson Tide draws closer. The Tigers will take on an Alabama team in a very similar boat, with the hopes one last win will improve the team's SEC tournament seeding significantly.

So what would one last conference win do for the purple and gold heading into postseason play? Right now there are a pool of six teams sitting at 9-8 or 8-9 in conference play fighting for those five through 10 seeds in next week's tournament.

A win over the 9-8 Crimson Tide would not only start to build momentum but likely improve their conference standing. While the Tigers feel confident they have locked up an NCAA tournament appearance, it's hard to really know until selection day just where they'll fall so every win and loss this late in the year carries a little extra weight.

"I think the worst we can be is ninth, the best we can be is fifth," Wade said of the SEC tournament standings. "At the end of the day, we're not playing on the first day, whether you're fifth or ninth it's more about the matchups."

Heading into this matchup, most bracket projections have the Tigers as a No. 6 or No. 7 seed so wins would keep LSU from dropping to an uneasy No. 8 or No. 9 seed. What LSU has going for it is the difficulty of schedule in the conference. Currently there are six teams in the top 25 out of the SEC, with LSU being one of them, and the Tigers will have played the other five a total of nine times this season.

LSU has been decent with handling the high end teams on the schedule this season but it's the ones like the loss at home to Ole Miss and the road losses to South Carolina and Vanderbilt that really hurt the Tigers come seeding time.

"I told our guys we are where we are, we've lost some heartbreakers but we didn't take care of business at home either," Wade said. "We did it to ourselves. We've played a remarkably difficult conference schedule, maybe the most difficult in SEC history and that's not hyperbole.

"You get what you earn and you get what you deserve and we've held our own at the top of the schedule but we haven't held our own to the middle or the bottom of the schedule and that's why we are where we are."

This is also a game that carries real confidence value for the program. Everyone remembers the loss last year in the SEC tournament championship by a matter of inches and earlier this season when LSU made a late run in Tuscaloosa that ultimately fell short. The Tigers have dropped the last five contests to the Crimson Tide, the last win coming on Jan. 29 of the 2019-20 season.

Getting that monkey off the program's back would add to the confidence boost for this team.

"I think there's definitely some progress and momentum but we've got to continue that," Wade said. "We've gotta pick ourselves back up and continue that tomorrow against a really good Alabama team we haven't beaten in a while. I really feel like we're a lot closer to playing how we need to play."