BATON ROUGE — Johnny Jones won himself a news conference on Monday.

Big time.

In fact, at times during his formal introduction to the LSU basketball community — a reintroduction, actually — it looked like he was running up the score.

That can be way overrated, of course, as news conferences, even formal introductory ones, don’t go into the formal won-loss record.

Nor is there any scientific evidence that they translate into success for the program after the TV cameras are turned off.

Maybe the most lackluster performance at one of these galas came from none other than Nick Saban himself, who turned out to be a pretty fair hire. It also came to light later that, at the time, Saban was winging it on about 50 hours since his last honest contact with a pillow.

If there was a worse debut, some of us are old enough to remember Bill Arnsparger, and that didn’t turn out too badly either.

But, in this case, in this sport at this school, it was important for Jones to capture the room, to nail the news conference, up to and including the perfect dismount for a standing ovation among all the former players and ex-fans and former program hangers-on in attendance.

LSU basketball fans haven’t had much to cheer about lately, and didn’t get too excited even when they did.

They were either fleeing the Maravich Assembly Center to get away from John Brady or giving up on trying to warm up to Trent Johnson, a decent enough fellow who unfortunately had little interest in the social niceties in this particular job description.

The program apathy was evidenced by the fact that after three straight losing SEC seasons, if Johnson hadn’t left of his own accord, next season was going to be his hot-seat year.

Imagine the lynch mob if Les Miles, who also dropped by for a look-see Monday, had three straight losing SEC seasons in football.

Maybe the most impressive thing about Jones’ homecoming Monday was that the affair had an LSU football atmosphere — it seemed genuinely important, with real electricity in the air and anticipation in the onlookers’ eyes.

There was a time when LSU basketball was routinely that.

On this day, the group needed something to, in Facebook terms, “like” about LSU basketball, and Jones was delivering. Even for the delusional fans who believed, because it’s LSU, the school should be able to produce the ghost of John Wooden from behind Door No. 3, it had to excite them.

If you needed any further reminders of the glorious Deaf Dome days that Jones was entrusted to rekindle, there was his mentor, Dale Brown, sitting on the front row trying to act like he wasn’t grinning from ear to ear (or wiping away tears).

He looked like a parent watching a son give the valedictory address and trying to be humble about it.

“What you see up there wasn’t made by Dale Brown,” he said. “It was made by two wonderful parents in DeRidder.

“Look at him up there, how he’s him embracing this. He’s having fun. This is not a chore for him.”

Brown, better than anybody, knows that at LSU at least, basketball isn’t just about opening the doors, rolling the ball on the floor and winning some games.

“He will charm the socks off of people,” Brown said, watching Jones chatting up well-wishers shortly after charming the socks off them for the better part of 30 minutes.

“You have to win, and he’ll get his W’s,” Brown said, always keeping one eye on his former pupil as he continued to work the room. “But what comes first is people and he put people first today.”

As bursting with pride as Brown was, he wasn’t totally surprised. He said he’s known “The Bullet” since he was a freshman at DeRidder High School.

Jones was a mere freshman in 1981 when he tagged along with a veteran team filled with the likes Ethan Martin, Rudy Macklin and Greg Cook to Brown’s first Final Four.

But Brown said Jones hardly “tagged along,” as I put it to him.

That’s when Brown first got an inkling that Jones had something special.

“All the older guys, they liked Johnny Jones,” Brown recalled. “There was something internally about him. Guys would go to him, the older guys, gravitate to him. They’d ask him things you’d think he’d be asking them.

“Plus, he had a great sense of humor and a knowledge of the game.”

Brown stepped back to watch again as, across the room, Jones deftly schmoozed a dozen or so radio and TV microphones as naturally as the master ever did.

It was suggested that Jones must have learned well from him.

“He’s not copying anybody,” Brown said. “He’s his own man. That was Johnny Jones — the head basketball coach at LSU.”

Brown choked up again at the thought. Wonder of wonders, he was almost speechless.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at shobbs@americanpress.com

LSU men’s basketball coach Johnny Jones. (Associated Press)

Libby Isenhower