After Two Straight Losses LSU Basketball Finds Itself in "27-Day Race" for SEC Title
It's a 27-day race. That's how LSU coach Will Wade described his team's current standings Monday after two road losses to Vanderbilt and Auburn.
"It's a race, 27 days and you gotta win every day," Wade said. "Eight of them are game days and 19 of them are rest, recovery and practice days and you have to be great on all those days. Whichever team's the best on all those days will come out on top. So we gotta focus in and just worry about winning each of those 27 days."
Much of Wade's press conference was him putting the loss at No. 11 Auburn on himself and not the players. For a quick turnaround from Vandy to Auburn, Wade thought his players did a tremendous job in effort and performance.
It's a loss that will stick with Wade because he said there were many things he wished he'd have done differently down the stretch to make sure LSU came out on top.
"That was on me down the stretch, messing that up," Wade said. "We played our asses off, we played so well. I should've called timeout at the end of regulation. You can't ask for a team to go in and play much better than that on a short turnaround. We played as hard as we could play, we played really, really well for about 27 minutes. For us to rally in overtime like that and take the lead, we played tremendous in a really tough environment."
Wade said Auburn did a great job of moving LSU players out of the paint, in turn keeping them off the offensive glass. The Tigers have been a phenomenal offensive rebounding team all year long so Wade said that isn't as high on the agenda of things he's worried about.
What Wade is worried about is taking the rest of conference play one day at a time and that starts tomorrow with Missouri. Missouri (11-12, 3-7) comes in hungry for a second straight SEC win after squeaking by Arkansas over the weekend.
With eight games remaining in conference play, LSU has as difficult a schedule as any team in the conference. After hosting Missouri on Tuesday, the Tigers have games with Alabama, No. 12 Kentucky, South Carolina, Florida and Texas A&M.
"I like our team, I like coaching our team, I feel real good about our team, no matter what happens moving forward," Wade said. "I think everybody would've taken the position we're in coming into the season. For the most part, our effort has been good except for Vanderbilt, which wasn't what we expected. But we turned that around and came back with unbelievable effort on a short turnaround in a really, really tough spot at Auburn. I didn't coach well enough down the stretch.
"We've got to respond the right way, we got to focus on the stuff we can control. I always tell them you know, everybody always says respond. What's the definition? Focus on the next most important thing. So the next thing is we have a great day today to prepare ourselves to have a good day tomorrow to give ourselves a chance to beat Missouri."
