Lamont Paris details difficulty of playing from behind

South Carolina lost its eighth straight game on Tuesday night at Missouri, unable to put together a run big enough to take the lead. And playing from behind has proven plenty difficult for the Gamecocks.

Coach Lamont Paris touched on the frustration that comes with having to chase games.

“Yeah, it’s difficult. It is,” Paris said. “It’s hard to do, especially if you can’t string five, six stops together at one point.”

That’s something South Carolina has found hard to do this year.

The game against Missouri was tight for the first 30 minutes or so, but the Tigers began to pull away late. The Gamecocks just couldn’t get the spurt they needed to gain some additional confidence.

“Any time we started doing something I felt like they would respond with points,” Paris said. “Sometimes it was a great play by them, we played pretty good defense, sometimes it was a letdown on our part. But either way we’d make a move and we’d try to make a move and they would always, they’d have a response to it.”

Playing from behind plaguing the Gamecocks

One of the biggest issues for South Carolina is that the team hasn’t been good at taking an early lead and then managing to defend it.

South Carolina has simply trailed too much, which is not a recipe for success on the road, in particular.

“It’s hard. It’s hard. You’re battling and you’re on the road and it’s nip and tuck,” Paris said. “You need a couple things. You just need one thing, a charge/block to go your way, an and-one to energize yourselves, a shot to go in, a late-clock scenario. They had one of those, right? Nick Honor makes one right at the buzzer on a cross-court skip from one side of the floor to the other.”

South Carolina just couldn’t seem to get one of its guys to make one of those plays when it really mattered.

“You need one of those and we just didn’t get one to really go when we really needed one,” Paris said. “So yeah, you’re fighting hard the entire time and sometimes just seeing yourselves with a one-point lead late in the game is enough. We didn’t get to that point late in the game, so it was difficult.”