Lamont Paris eyeing SEC Tournament as 'good precursor to the NCAA Tournament'

The South Carolina basketball team put together a tremendous second season under coach Lamont Paris, earning the No. 5 seed in this year’s SEC Tournament.

And Paris believes this week in Nashville affords his team a real chance to get ready for what lies ahead: the NCAA Tournament. The Gamecocks have fought all year for this.

“We want to win the SEC Tournament, there’s a lot that goes with that,” Paris said Wednesday on the Paul Finebaum Show. “But I think it’s a good precursor to the NCAA Tournament just in terms of there’s nothing guaranteed other than the game we play tomorrow at 2:30. And you must play well, you must compete well and you must also make plays in order to advance. And if you do enough of those things and you earn another 40 minutes, then you do it all again.”

South Carolina will take on the winner of the Arkansas-Vanderbilt game, which will be played as the first half of a double-header at the SEC Tournament on Wednesday night.

The Gamecocks will be looking to advance to the quarterfinals, where they would face Auburn on Friday.

All of it will be a learning experience, one that Paris hopes to take full advantage of with his team, knowing many of his players haven’t been part of a postseason tournament scenario before.

“So I think before going into the NCAA Tournament, having a chance to practice that, I think that’s incredibly important for a team, again, that’s learning a lot of first things as you’ve got so many new faces,” he said.

Paris isn’t altogether concerned that the new environment at the SEC Tournament will throw his team off. That’s in part because his squad has already proven pretty resilient away from home.

It’s also in part because he designs his program to be replicable away from home.

“We try to be as consistent as we can,” Paris said. “I think that’s part of the reason why we were 11-3 this season away from home. I think it’s because we really try to replicate our routine, whether we’re at home, whether we’re on the road, whether it’s a tournament environment or whatever it is, and that maybe allows us to dive more into what we do.

“But obviously it’s a little different. You have quicker turnaround when you’re playing back-to-back-to-back in games like this or even in the NCAA Tournament, you may have a day off in between. So there’s a little bit different to that. You have to be a quick study when it comes to scouting report. I think it’s also why we build our situation in such that most of what we do is us. Most of what has to do with scouting report in our program is personnel. We go over some plays and your team has certain tendencies, but the vast majority of it is (us).”

South Carolina will begin SEC Tournament play around 3:30 p.m. ET on Thursday, with a broadcast on the SEC Network.