With so many fresh faces entering this season, LSU men’s basketball coach Johnny Jones knew it would take some time for his newly equipped team to jell on the court. 
Because LSU sophomore forwards Jarell Martin and Jordan Mickey were Jones’ only returning starters, how quickly they meshed with the new players around them was going to spell either success or doom for the Tigers’ NCAA Tournament hopes.  
To speed up his team’s development, Jones has piled heavy minutes on the Tigers’ most relied-upon players, a simple yet effective strategy that has built one of the stoutest five-man lineups in the Southeastern Conference. 
LSU sophomore guard Tim Quarterman, who’s logging 33.1 minutes per game off the bench, said the plan has worked wonders. 
“We’re always on the court together, so your chemistry can’t do anything but get better,” Quarterman said. “You know the other players’ tendencies. Sometimes I know what [junior guard] Josh [Gray] is going to do before he does it. You get to know another person better than you did before.”
If the Tigers weren’t comfortable with one another on the
court before the season, they likely are now. LSU is the SEC’s only team with five players averaging at least 30 minutes a night. 
Joining Quarterman in the 30-minutes-a-night club are Mickey (34.6), Martin (34.3), Gray (30.6) and junior guard Keith Hornsby (34.2). Practice can only help a team so much, Hornsby said, so playing heavy minutes in a game-like environment is the only way to properly get up to speed. 
“There’s nothing like game shape, and I feel like playing a lot of minutes is the only way you can get that,” Hornsby said. “It’s helped each of us playing those minutes get more confidence.” 
The confidence didn’t seem to be there when the Tigers got off to a rough 3-2 start with losses to Old Dominion and lowly Clemson, which dropped to a 1-3 start in Atlantic Coast Conference play following a 23-point shellacking by No. 2 Virginia on Tuesday. 
Those defeats earlier in the season, coupled with an uninspiring five-point overtime victory against Texas Tech, which is currently last in the Big 12, made the Tigers’ lofty postseason goals appear a tad out of reach. 
But even in those subpar outings, the kinks were still being worked out. 
“We’ve had some [adversity] for sure, mainly in the earlier part of the year,” Hornsby said. “But even in some of our wins, we weren’t as pretty as we would’ve liked. In some of those wins, we really focused on the areas we can improve on, and I think we’ve improved on some of those things but still have a ways to go.”
One thing LSU doesn’t need much more improvement on is scoring. Prior to Wednesday’s game against Ole Miss, the Tigers were the SEC’s third-highest scoring team at 75.8 points per game. 
However, LSU is the only squad in the conference with five players ranked in the top 36 in scoring, topped by Martin’s 16.8 average. But who scores hasn’t mattered to the Tigers. 
“The biggest thing at the end of the day is we just want to win,” Martin said. “We’re a very unselfish team. We just give credit to the team when we get [a] victory.” 
Not only can the Tigers score, but they do it by playing team basketball, which can come only through extensive time together on the court. 
Of LSU’s 28.6 field goals per game, 16.6 come via assists, which ranks second behind Arkansas in the SEC. Jones said he knew it would take some time for his players to become familiar on the court, but even he has been taken aback by how quickly they’ve adjusted to one another. 
“I have to commend our players for how they’ve adapted with their chemistry and their bonding in playing together and trusting each other and playing off of each other,” Jones said. “They pull for each other, and they have made each other better as the year is progressing.
“Anytime you have that type of turnover and have the new faces that we have come in, for those guys to be able to play together the way they have and to feed off of each other the way they have, it says a lot about them.”
You can reach David Gray on Twitter @dgray_TDR.