Time Out: Scott Rabalais for Feb. 20, 2012
LSU teams doing well on court
Nobody is talking about waking up the echoes of 2006 just yet, that unparalleled season when the LSU men’s and women’s basketball teams reached their respective Final Fours.
No one is making that much of a mark on the face of programs shaped by Pistol Pete and Shaq and Seimone Augustus that they’re going to have their jerseys hung from the rafters.
But there is a basketball mini-Renaissance going on beneath those rafters at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center, and if you haven’t caught it in person yet, that’s too bad. There are precious few performances left.
A month ago, the Tigers and Lady Tigers were just part of the malaise permeating the LSU athletic scene in the wake of the football team’s Jan. 9 debacle in the BCS National Championship Game against Alabama.
The men’s team ended January with a 74-50 loss to No. 1-ranked Kentucky, a loss that dropped the Tigers to 12-9 and 2-5 in Southeastern Conference play. The Lady Tigers stumbled into early February having lost five straight SEC games to freefall from a 4-0 conference start and put themselves in danger of missing the NCAA Tournament for a second straight year.
Since then, there has been improvement, and perhaps even more importantly, hope, in LSU hoops land.
The Tigers have won four of their last five and have worked their way up to 16-10 and 6-6 in SEC play, good enough to be part of a four-way logjam for fourth place in the conference. Considering LSU doesn’t exactly face Murderers’ Row to close the season — Georgia, at Ole Miss, Tennessee, at Auburn, and all but the Volunteers below-.500 in the SEC — the Tigers’ chances of earning a first-round bye to the SEC tournament in New Orleans Arena are pretty decent.
If LSU can do that, the Tigers can enhance their hopes of earning at least an NIT berth. That would be considered progress, the recruiting loss of Riverside star Ricardo Gathers aside, with a strong core of players returning for an even more promising 2012-13 season.
The Lady Tigers have finally shaken off the trauma of point guard Destini Hughes’ season-ending knee injury on Jan. 19 — Hughes’ loss was the worst possible blow to an LSU team deep in post players but short on ball handlers — and won five straight SEC games. They’ve done it with an Iron Curtain-like 2-3 matchup zone defense and inventive personnel decisions by first-year coach Nikki Caldwell that mostly hide the fact the Lady Tigers now possess no true point guard.
At 19-8 and 9-5, LSU is in a four-way tie for third in the SEC women’s standings. While the Lady Tigers went 19-13 and 8-8 last year and didn’t get an NCAA invite, considering they’ve secured a plus-.500 SEC record and are hosting the first- and second-round NCAA Tournament games, one figures they’re just about a lock.
The Tigers host Georgia on Wednesday, while the Lady Tigers host Vanderbilt on Thursday. Make it a point to go see them play. In a year that started with such a downer, they’re the two best feel good stories going in LSU athletics.