Matt McMahon waiting until after season for self-evaluation

The LSU basketball program rolled into conference play riding an 11-1 record and then immediately took down a top-10 Arkansas team. It was a star reversal from there, as the Tigers won only one of their next 18 games.

But coach Matt McMahon isn’t ready to do too much dissection on the 2022-23 campaign yet to see exactly what went wrong.

There’s still an SEC Tournament to play.

“Not to push it to the end of the season but that’s certainly something that we’ll spend a lot of time evaluating. It’s been very challenging. I wish I had done a better job for our players and given them more opportunities to win games this year.

“But self-evaluation and program evaluation, all that, will be done after the season in how we need to move forward from there.”

LSU will get a chance to at least somewhat change the narrative on this season if it can make a little bit of a run in Nashville, Tenn., at the SEC Tournament.

The Tigers will be playing in the opening-round action, set to take on Georgia at 9 p.m. ET on Wednesday on the SEC Network.

Matt McMahon shares tournament coaching strategy

McMahon is getting ready for his first postseason tournament coaching the Tigers. But expectations are now very low for LSU as it enters the SEC Tournament.

The Tigers ended the regular season with a 13-18 record and 2-16 mark in SEC play.

“This is a unique arrival to the postseason.” McMahon said during a Monday media availability. “I think for us it just has to be about you’re zero and zero. You have nothing to lose. Let’s bring a lot of energy., play with great effort, try to do the best we can to clean up some of those defensive errors and and offensive turnovers and find a way to go 1-0 on Wednesday. That’ll need to be the approach these next 48 hours.”

McMahon just wants to see his team play with confidence.

“Hopefully, (we) go into the tournament and play with confidence,” McMahon said. “Loose, I would always want us to play that way; loose and confident. But I don’t think practice today is really about trying to change a whole lot of different things. As to the first opponent, Georgia, that was the difference in the game last time. We had 19 turnovers. So, ball security will continue to be point of emphasis if we want to have a chance to win on Wednesday.”