“Best shot-blocking team we’ve ever had”: Kermit Davis learned a lot about his Ole Miss Rebels in the Bahamas

Kermit Davis said Ole Miss’ foreign trip to the Bahamas, which ran from the last week of July to the first of August, naturally allowed for plenty of rest and relaxation.

More important for the purposes of the Rebels’ upcoming season, though, it was filled with a whole heck of a lot of basketball, too.

Davis was eager to see what he had in his new-look team, the fifth iteration of the Rebels under Davis since he was hired back in 2018. Davis took Ole Miss back to the NCAA Tournament that year, but the Rebels haven’t returned since.

Ole Miss has eight new players, including four transfers signed in the spring. Buffalo’s Josh Mballa didn’t participate as one of the most-recent additions to the injured list, but Davis still came away encouraged by the work the Rebels got in. Ole Miss was a perfect 3-0 in games played.

“You find a lot of good and bad with your team,” Davis told the Ole Miss Spirit. “I shouldn’t say bad, but stuff you can really improve on. The good part was we played our best basketball in the third game. We competed harder on the ball.

“(True freshmen) TJ Caldwell (and) Amaree Abram guarded better. Matt Murrell’s going to have a terrific year, but he probably didn’t play as good as we know Matt can play, and we still could do some things offensively. Matt led in a great way and guarded.”

One area of strength, in particular, was made quite obvious. 

“I know it’s the best shot-blocking team we’ve ever had since I’ve been at Ole Miss,” Davis said. “(Veteran guard and former Georgia transfer) Tye Fagan had to be limited because of a knee, so we really went with nine guys, and when Tye played, he played well. We had to play him in limited spots. I love that we’ve got (true freshman center) Malique Ewin. He played his best game in the third game.

“As you always do on these trips, you can see some basketball you need to improve, but it was really positive. The film sessions we had were great. A lot of our young guys played well. We’ve got to get home, and if we can get our team healthy, we have a really good team with all the depth. I was really proud of the progress that we made.”

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Davis said the injury-riddled Rebels played a vanilla brand of basketball in their games in Nassau and Atlantis.

As previously reported by the Spirit, Ole Miss was already down Daeshun Ruffin and Robert Allen, as both are still recovering from significant ACL injuries suffered last season. Neither traveled.

But the hits kept coming. 

Ole Miss held 10 practices before the trip, and Mballa, a transfer forward from Buffalo, and Robert Cowherd, a true freshman guard, were both injured, too. They’ll be out for nearly two months. 

Cowherd tore a meniscus and underwent surgery. Mballa is out with a knee sprain. Davis said they’ll be out until mid-September at the earliest.

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“We were no frills,” Davis said. “We didn’t switch anything (or) play any 1-3-1 (defensively). Kind of basic man-to-man, and rebounded our opponents by 20 or 30. We should have, and we blocked shots. Our defensive field goal percentage was really low, and it should have been. We’re athletic. We’ll get better at competing, but I think we can be an elite defensive team, especially when we start putting our packages in.

“We were real vanilla, which is exactly what we wanted to do this summer. Got our base defense in, and we’ll really start putting some things in in September when we get back. We changed more shots at the rim, rim-protected, and I’ve seen it all summer in practice. That’ll be a strength. In today’s game, that’s getting more and more prevalent in college basketball.”

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Not all was perfect, however. 

The Rebels trailed the Bahamian national team after the first two quarters of play in Game One. But Ole Miss came out swinging in the second half, shooting 47.7 percent in the back end and ripping off a late 11-0 run to seal the game for good.

Most noticeable to Davis was the lack of overall conditioning, which he said must improve when the season tips off in earnest in a couple of months. Ole Miss opens with Alcorn State November 7.

“Our conditioning has to improve,” he said. “That’s something we’ll address early. I hate to say it, but we’ve just go to get healthy. If we can get our team whole, and we hope to get these guys back middle of September or first of October, the biggest key is those guys have to get practice time. They have to go through some tough stuff. They can’t all of the sudden get healthy and put them in games. They’re not the same. 

“That’s the biggest thing. The guys that played on the tour improved. Get these guys healthy and we can have five or six weeks of good practices. If we do, we’re going to be right in the middle of the SEC.”