Lamont Paris shares rationale behind South Carolina's offensive scheme

At the midway point of the season, South Carolina has already racked up an SEC-best 16 wins, putting itself firmly into position to make the NCAA Tournament.

The Gamecocks aren’t overly flashy, but they play hard on defense have an offensive scheme that allows for a lot of success. It starts with the basics.

“I’ve been an inside-out guy,” coach Lamont Paris said. “I mean I think everybody will talk about the fact that I like threes. We’ve had some games where we shot 26 threes and didn’t make a whole bunch of them. But I like it to start on the inside, honestly. And then it sends a message, I think, and I just have always been that way.”

As things currently stand, South Carolina is firing up about 24.7 3-point attempts per contest, good for 66th in the nation. That’s well above average.

The team has converted a good number of them, too, draining 8.5 per contest.

The 3-point line was a key factor in the team’s game against Kentucky on Tuesday night, too. The No. 6 Wildcats would hit only four 3-pointers in the contest, but the Gamecocks made 11 of them. That helped pave the way for a 79-62 upset.

“I thought there were a couple matchups that we could take advantage of,” Paris said. “I thought if we put Josh (Gray), in particularly, I thought if they threw Big Z in the game that we would try to sub in and have Josh lay his mass against his body and see how that turned out. And Josh did some good things. He caught the ball and pivoted, which seems as basic as it is, but when you’re in that moment and you’ve got a guy out there, and to catch it and pivot and make a strong move, he did a really good job of that. So we obviously got some real good minutes from Josh.

“But even BJ (Mack), we got BJ down there. Collin (Murray-Boyles). I just, I like to be aggressive around the basket if we can, and then I think that opens up things on the perimeter as well.”

It worked against the Wildcats. The Gamecocks claimed a 36-33 edge in rebounding and used it to control the tempo throughout the game.

When it all came down, South Carolina was simply better than Kentucky in virtually every facet of the game, with the offense scheme once again serving up a quality win.