“Just win, baby.”
Even without explicitly stating it, the old adage from former Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis is the unofficial motto for the LSU men’s basketball team with six games left in the regular season.
No, the Tigers (16-9, 9-3 Southeastern Conference) aren’t focused on the NCAA tournament yet, they say. No, they weren’t specifically looking at Saturday’s win against then-No. 15 Texas A&M as a résumé building victory. If anything, senior guard Keith Hornsby said the 76-71 win was also revenge for the 14-point road loss to the Aggies on Jan. 19 and two losses to Texas A&M last season.
Rather, simply winning the next game is currently most important to LSU, which is still tied for first place in the SEC with then-No. 22 Kentucky. The rest, including Rating Percentage Index standing, will “take care of itself,” said LSU coach Johnny Jones.
“We just talk about winning,” he said. “That’s the main thing. All that stuff is for naught if we don’t win.”
With three weeks left in the regular season, LSU currently sits at No. 69 in ESPN’s latest RPI. Often referred to as a key to team’s résumé, RPI — which measures winning percentage for a team, its opponents and its opponent’s opponents — naturally fluctuates through the course of a season.
Most importantly, it doesn’t always tell the full story of a potential tournament team, which bodes well for LSU. As Jones often points out, LSU played without Hornsby and sophomore forward Craig Victor II for the first part of the season, resulting in a 7-5 record before conference play with more shocking losses than solid wins. On top of that, the nonconference slate ranks 211th in strength of schedule.
However, since the new year began, the Tigers have notched six wins against top-100 RPI teams, slowly building a résumé worth consideration. But the work is far from over, as Victor will attest.
“The NCAA tournament is way down the line,” he said. “If we start getting caught up in the NCAA tournament, what’s the point? You got to take it one day at a time to get there. It’s not like we can just skip over and play in the NCAA tournament and not be there.”
Even with solid wins in conference play, missed opportunities, including the road loss to South Carolina earlier in the week, made the early failures tougher to swallow for the Tigers. For a team playing with its back against the wall for much of the second half of the season, the sense of urgency and passion is what stood out to Hornsby against the Aggies.
“Especially in the second half, we really played with that urgency,” he said. “Because we had a lot of momentum, and we just kind of told each other, ‘We weren’t going to let this one slip away. We’re in a good position. We need to buckle down, get the stops that we need and just finish the game strong.’”
Victor didn’t feel like the passion and intensity with which LSU played was uncommon, even if isn’t always present.
“That’s nothing new for this team,” he said. “We just have to hold ourselves to those standards every game. The Kentucky game, can pretty much say the same thing — the Arkansas game, Vanderbilt. This is not our first time showing people we can play hard. Consistency is the key.”
At this point, consistency down the final haul is optimal for a team that hasn’t won three straight games since late December. LSU opens up the six-game stretch at home with Alabama, which battled the Tigers down to wire in a two-point LSU win on Jan. 23 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Road trips to lower-tier SEC teams Tennessee and Arkansas follow before a hosting Florida on Jan. 27.
The home game against the Gators, who are No. 31 in ESPN’s RPI, will be the final chance for a quality win in the PMAC. After hosting last place Missouri, the Tigers close out the regular season on the road against the Wildcats — which could decide the conference regular season title and cement LSU as NCAA tournament team.
With a SEC crown on the table, there’s really nothing more the Tigers need to focus on, Victor said.
“That’s what’s first,” he said. “That comes first before anything.”