He’s back.
Will Wade makes his return to the Pete Maravich Assembly Center bench for regular season action on Tuesday night.
LSU should handle LSU-New Orleans, formerly UNO. It’s one game of a 32-game regular season. Gonzaga and Houston headline the non-conference schedule, and the SEC will be another 18-game grind.
It’s hard to tell just how this LSU team will handle that slate. Half the impact players were deemed eligible a week before the regular season began. They’ve been practicing, but this is not a team that has had a full eight to 10 months to gel.
They speak different primary languages and haven’t shared the court much. It will be an evolving team. Tuesday’s product won’t tell us much about what this team will look like in mid-February when the biggest games on the schedule play out.
Still, it’s opening night. There should be a bit of a buzz in the air. Wade generates that, and his high school recruiting for next year’s team would suggest he’s going to assemble some serious talent in Baton Rouge once again.
Here’s what I’m looking for tonight.
THEY’RE FREE
LSU’s free throw shooting in exhibition play was atrocious. The Tigers only made 45 of 76 from the charity stripe. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing LSU-New Orleans, Houston or the Oklahoma City Thunder. Those shots are exactly the same.
That three-game sample size was 59%. Last year, Davidson was last of 365 teams in Division I at 64%. That has to change. LSU needs to be north of 70 percent on Tuesday.
DEFENSIVE DECISIONS
I think LSU can be pretty good on defense with this group of players.
Saliou Niang and Mo Dioubate are great athletes on the wing. Skyy Clark and Donovan Dent are quality defenders at the guard spots. Brice Dessert and Michael Ruzic move well enough at their size to make plays at the rim.
Wade is a man-to-man coach, but he deploys it in different ways. I’ve seen his teams play it straight. I’ve seen his teams press. His last LSU team was elite defensively, switching 1-5 on screens.
I’m just curious to see what style he plays on Tuesday. The first two exhibition games didn’t reveal anything because he only had five players.
FAMILIAR FACE
John Brady returns to the PMAC on Tuesday. He was named senior advisor for athletic advancement and men’s basketball strategy at LSU-NO over the summer. Of course, Brady led LSU to the Final Four in 2006 and served as the color commentator on the LSU Sports Radio Network broadcasts alongside Chris Blair in recent years.
The Privateers won their lone exhibition, 82-72, at Southern Miss. They’re led by head coach Stacy Hollowell in his third season on the Lakefront of New Orleans. LSU won last year’s matchup 93-58.
