Tigers fail chemistry experiment

Published 2:28 pm Friday, February 26, 2016

Gosh, was it only November when LSU basketball was selling every available ticket in the Maravich Assembly Center, with expectations threatening to blow the roof off the joint?

Long negligent LSU basketball fans were ready to embrace the sport again.

And, in truth, the place really has become the Deaf Dome again, even now filled and rocking with decibel levels not heard since Dale Brown’s hey day.

The question is … why?

So what were these people thinking anyway?

It seemed pretty reasonable. The Tigers suddenly had the proclaimed best player in the country in projected No. 1 NBA pick Ben Simmons.

And …

Basketball, LSU fans must be thinking, just when you thought you could trust it again …

So here we are now in the stretch run of what was supposed to be a memorable season and the situation has deteriorated to this: after spending the last month tap dancing around the NCAA tournament bubble — seemingly always taking a step back every time it looked like the Tigers might leap across to the fool thing — it will now take a miracle to get to get anywhere near the Big Dance.

The Tigers have been reduced to hoping to win, or at least make the finals of, the Southeastern Conference tournament.

They probably can’t win enough games in the regular season with three remaining, even if one of them is at Kentucky, to do much to make amends for the last two weeks.

Was it just two weeks ago that LSU was sitting alone atop the SEC standings?

True, while it made for nice purple-and-gold view, even then it didn’t quite look or feel right.

Even then, instead of putting a mediocre preconference behind them, it seemed a little more of an indictment of the league than welcoming the Tigers back to basketball relevance.

They never had the look of a national contender.

Still, from that vantage point, as big of a mirage as it may have been, you could see that it might still come together.

That’s the really puzzling thing.

The fork in the road — where’s this team headed now? — has been a train wreck.

When it came time to make the big push, the Tigers, once 8-2 in the conference, have lost four of their last five games.

LSU has lost three consecutive games to teams outside the NCAA’s top 100 Rating Percentage Index ??— teams with losing conference records.

Not only have the Tigers lost three straight to lesser opponents, but all three losses have looked far worse than the one before it.

Even Athletic Director Joe Alleva was up to some tricks last week when he personally initiated an appearance on a sports radio talk show to, as a member of the NCAA tournament selection committee, proclaim the Tigers’ postseason hopes to be on life support at best.

It was curious coming from the team’s own athletic director. To some it was reminiscent of the distractions at the end of football season and the whole fiasco over Les Miles’ future.

That probably wasn’t the case here.

More likely — and head coach Johnny Jones may have been in on the plot — it was just an orchestrated, if desperate, stunt to light a fire under an underachieving team.

It didn’t work. Instead it has been a total free fall.

Since the AD got involved, LSU has played arguably its two worst games of the season in losses to previously struggling Tennessee and Arkansas.

At a time when a young team ought to be putting it all together it has instead gone through a monumental collapse.

Keith Hornsby, the closest thing this team had to glue to hold it together, is out indefinitely with an injury.

That doesn’t explain the second-half futility of the last few games.

In truth, there’s not a lot of depth. The fall off inside when either Simmons or Craig Victor are out — which is often — is mind boggling.

Tuesday, in a 85-65 loss at Arkansas, came the stat of the season — the Razorbacks bench outscored the Tigers 32-0.

LSU never did play much defense, and suddenly it can’t seem to score more than 60-ish points.

Simmons seems to be doing his best.

But another alleged NBA draft pick, Tim Quartermann, has disappeared from the offense over the last month or so and the surest way to stop what it still presumed to be the next No. 1 pick in the NBA draft is to foul him and watch him dent backboards from the line.

Yes, LSU had a lot of expectations that weren’t unwarranted.

What it never seemed to acquire was any real chemistry.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU

athletics. Email him at

shobbs@americanpress.com