Lamont Paris pleased with how South Carolina played against Arkansas, braces for Auburn
South Carolina capped off an impressive 80-66 win over Arkansas in the team’s first game in the SEC tournament.
The Gamecocks seem to have things well on track heading into one of the season’s biggest games, a rematch with Auburn in the quarterfinals.
Head coach Lamont Paris was very happy with his team’s effort against the Razorbacks.
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“It’s such a fun time of the year, it was a great atmosphere in there. Just a good college basketball game,” he said. “I thought our guys had a good effort from start to finish. There also were some lulls in there. Just thought it was a tremendous effort sharing the ball and our overall effort and how we played.”
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South Carolina narrowly missed out on a double bye for the SEC Tournament, and the perception is that playing an earlier game can sometimes hurt teams. However, Paris thinks it could play to the Gamecocks’ advantage.
“Yeah, it’s only bad to play this game if you lose this game,” Paris said. “If you win this game, it can work, especially when you play well. I thought we played well today in a lot of different ways. Our general body of work was really good.”
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South Carolina took care of business once they gained the lead late in the first half. The rust and nerves seemed to have been knocked off.
“It was good to get back into it. We’re in the flow. You get a feel for it. You watch a couple of games yesterday. I think it could really work to your benefit,” Paris explained. “Hopefully it has. We also played really well today. The guys will get rested, we’ll watch a little tape tonight. Hopefully some of the guys that did some pretty good things will carry that forward in terms of confidence as we prepare to play a really, really good team tomorrow.”
Auburn Looms Ahead
South Carolina will take on Auburn Friday in the third round of the SEC tournament. The Gamecocks suffered their worst loss of the season, a road contest, against the Tigers back in February.
Paris revealed his team needs to stick to their bread and butter if they expect to win tomorrow. The keys are simple, now South Carolina just needs to execute.
“We got to do what we normally do: play our way, defend at a high level, finish plays off with a rebound, be aggressive on the offensive end,” Paris said. “Hopefully, we’ll just play better and to some degree hopefully they won’t shoot the ball like that. That would be some real bad karma if they could do that twice in a row against us (smiling).”
