Tigers hope to be dancing in March

This year, another 18-12 season won't be good enough for the Tigers.

By Mike Bushnell

Published Nov. 13, 2007

In the 2006-07 season, the Missouri men's basketball team surprised many pundits by finishing in the top half of the Big 12. This year, with 88 percent of last season's scoring returning, sophomore guard Keon Lawrence said another 18-12 season won't be good enough.

"We know what's out there for us," he said. "We know where we should be at the end of the season."

And that's the NCAA Tournament. Coach Mike Anderson has never missed the tournament in his second year at any school. He made it as an assistant at Arkansas and a coach at Alabama-Birmingham.

Anderson's "40 minutes of hell" should be back in full force again, featuring an extremely up-tempo game that looks to wear down opponents. Sophomore guard J.T. Tiller said MU's frenetic pace goes against the norm of basketball.

"There aren't positions on the floor," he said. "We're all just ballers. We just push it up and down the court."

Lawrence said he thinks this season will end differently than last year, when the Tigers began to look tired defensively. In the first round of the Big 12 Tournament last March in Oklahoma City, they let No. 11-seed Baylor put up 97 points on them.

"We're more conditioned than we were last year," Tiller said. "In practice, coach always tells us to get into our third, our fourth gear. If we do that all season, we'll be fine. And I think we will be because of how hard we work."

Carroll said Anderson has found a new devotion to defense in order to avoid any more games like the one that ended their last season.

"Coach has really been stressing defense," he said. "So if you don't play defense and don't work hard, you won't play."

Anderson said he runs a hard practice because he wants his players to be that tough on opposing teams.

"I tell our guys to bring their practice to the game," he said. "We play in spurts. We push the ball. And our guys are prepared to do that because of what we do in practice."

Senior forward Leo Lyons said the Tigers work as hard any team in the country.

"Nobody practices harder than us," he said. "We all know how hard we work."

Anderson said another of his coaching quirks involves utilizing a deep bench. He said his team needs to be able to go all the way down the bench and still play at a high level.

"When you talk about balance, we have balance," he said. "Somebody's going to have to bring it every night. There's a lot of guys who contribute, and that makes us a very deep team."

Lyons said Anderson doesn't practice with a first team or a second team, but rather he makes sure everyone on the team knows how his system works.

"We've got a lot of guys that could start at any given time," he said. "Everybody is going to go out there and play hard. Everybody knows how to play the system. So it works out well for us."

The main contributors in 2006 are all back, excluding senior center Kalen Grimes. He was dismissed from the team in July after he was arrested in Florissant and charged with felony assault. A week before that, transfer forward DeMarre Carroll was shot in the ankle outside a bar in downtown Columbia.

Senior center Darryl Butterfield was suspended from the team in the fall and later pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace. But Lawrence said the team had blocked out a relatively tumultuous summer and have stayed focused on the upcoming season.

"Everything from the summer is over," he said. "Whatever happened in the off-season, it's all behind us. We have Darryl back, DeMarre is healthy and that's important."

Grimes led the Tigers in rebounding last season with 5.6 per game. MU will need Carroll, the Big 12 preseason Newcomer of the Year, to pick up where Grimes left off. And Anderson said he was confident in DeMarre's ability.

"DeMarre doesn't miss a shot," he said. "He's a great forward, a tremendous talent. He's going to do a lot for us."

After spending all last season on the bench watching Anderson's offense, Carroll said he was ready for action.

"I've learned a lot sitting out. You can learn a lot just by watching," he said. "But I'm ready to be a major contributor to this team. I'm going to go out there every night and just leave it all on the floor."

Lawrence said Carroll, who averaged 10.9 points and 6.4 rebounds per game in 2005-06 with Vanderbilt, will be a major upgrade defensively.

"DeMarre is going to make a big impact," he said. "He's going to make us a whole lot stronger inside."

Also in the paint, Butterfield will also need to improve on his 2.8 rebounds per game. He was routinely overwhelmed during conference play last season, but Carroll said Butterfield impressed him during the summer.

"Darryl can bang people around," Carroll said. "He's a real energy guy, and he brings a lot. He's been working really hard for this season."

But this is a fast-paced offense, and the main cog will likely be senior guard Stefhon Hannah. Last season's Big 12 Newcomer of the Year averaged 15.4 points per game. Junior forward Matt Lawrence shot more than 40 percent from three-point range, and senior forward Marshall Brown averaged 10 points per game.

Anderson said the fact that his team spreads the ball around to non-starters like Matt Lawrence will force opposing teams to go deep into their lineup.

"We want to make people play their bench," he said. "I like our bench. If our bench can continue to produce like that, then hopefully that's a sign of us getting better."

This season will answer the question of whether Anderson's up-tempo style can work at the major conference level. Missouri and the Big 12 are, as a whole, a step up from UAB and Conference USA. But Lyons said the Tigers' speed will create mismatches.

"The Big 12 has a lot of huge centers that can't really move," he said. "So by us being out there and having it spread, we're just going to get easy baskets."

Anderson said he's excited to find out if that's true or not.

"We're back again under the lights," he said. "It's lights, camera and action. It's for keeps now."