What Lamont Paris said after South Carolina's 35-point loss to Mississippi State
Following an 85-50 loss to No. 17 Mississippi State, South Carolina head coach Lamont Paris spoke to the media who made the trip to Starkville after the game. Below is a summary of what he had to say.
— Mississippi State did a lot of things well, South Carolina didn’t do many things well at all. They played poorly in a lot of ways today.
— Sometimes it’s like that. This was the first SEC game for a couple guys on the team that play heavy minutes. But they also have a lot of experienced guys who didn’t play great. MSU played great. You’re going to get a wide spread when things like this happen.
— Looked at their game last year at Mississippi State, and the SEC opener at home against them last year. South Carolina played atrocious but went into halftime with a lead because they defended on a consistent basis. This year, they’re still learning how to do that. Not sure why it was a bad start today. They just didn’t have it.
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— Would agree that the team wasn’t physical or aggressive today. You just do it to fix that problem. By nature, Mississippi State is a more aggressive group of individuals. Needed to match that aggressiveness with resistance, which they didn’t today. To dig deeper defensively, that takes some real maturity. That was one area he didn’t think they answered the bell. They didn’t compete that way.
— Wouldn’t surprise him if they went 2-for-19 from three or if they didn’t adjust to some of the unique things MSU does as a defensive unit. But not fighting, that did surprise him. It doesn’t anger him. It just surprises him.
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— Been in a lot of games over his coaching career. He’s seen that a lot where teams have struggled in games. Always optimistic about how his team will respond. But at some point in the second half, he felt some disconnect that the light wasn’t coming on, which is a dangerous game to play.
— With the slow starts, there’s been a variety of ways in which they’ve struggled to score. Sometimes it’s just missing shots that don’t fall your way. The case today was struggling to pass the ball to the guys in the same colored uniforms. It just seems like things are connected in terms of one guy struggling which leads to another struggling as well.
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— It’s hard to throw a guy out there who hasn’t played a lot of minutes (in reference to being asked about Arden Conyers). It’s hard to inject a person into a scenario when they haven’t been in this scenario much before. Some of Cam Scott’s minutes looked like that to some degree with struggles. That’s hard to go to a guy like Conyers who hasn’t been in those spots yet.
— His urgency is the same for every single game. Every single game. It’s an 18-hole, 18-game story. At some point, you’ll look back and say this is what you did or this is not what you did. For him, there’s not one bit more urgency. This is a good team. They are as motivated to be 1-1 in the conference as they would be if they were 1-0 after today. They are very urgent in everything they do.
