Lamont Paris shares how he kept South Carolina focused during slow start

South Carolina coach Lamont Paris remained calm when his team got down double digits to Georgia on Saturday. The Bulldogs got off to a hot start, making eight 3-pointers in the first half and jumping out to a 29-19 lead by the 8:05 mark.

Basketball is often a game of runs, however, and Paris made sure his team hadn’t forgotten that. Ultimately, they were able to turn it around and pull away in the second half for a 72-62 win.

“We just remind them it’s a basketball game for 40 minutes,” Paris said. “There’s a lot of possessions. You can’t overreact. It may have seemed like there was a little overreaction. I said that at halftime. There was a couple of times where we did overreact. But we do need to overreact on things that we can control. Here’s a screen. You’re supposed to go over it and you went under it. Well, let’s overreact to that so that next time you’re gonna get that opportunity, you go over the screen.”

The Gamecocks eventually settled in and cut the lead down to 40-38 by halftime. They then used a big second half, locking down on defense to hold Georgia to 1-of-10 from 3-point range on their way to the win.

Lamont Paris was proud of the way his South Carolina held strong through the early shots from the Bulldogs, answering the call to play tighter defensively amid the scoring barrage.

“The best shooter on most college teams, if they just randomly walk onto the court and get 10 wide open 3s, they’ll hit seven I guess,” he said. “So we didn’t want to overreact because they made some shots. Let’s press up closer. Get a hand up on the guys that are shooting the ball. We don’t have any fouls, let’s press up closer. If they go by us, we can take a foul. So I think that was the message.”

Collin Murray-Boyles led the Gamecocks with 16 points, while Josh Gray contributed 15 points and eight rebounds off the bench. The victory marked the fifth straight for South Carolina as it returned the favor to Georgia for a 74-69 home loss suffered last month.

With the win, the Gamecocks improved to 19-3 (7-2 SEC) and are currently in second place in the conference standings. They’re unranked at the moment, but that will surely change ahead of their next matchup against Ole Miss on Tuesday.