Laney: Temple, LSU flex defensive muscle early

• By GARY LANEY
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Jan 5, 2009 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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You’ve seen a night where a shooter gets unconscious and can’t miss. Think Chris Jackson on a roll.

Or a night where a pitcher hits the spot every time and just carves up the strike zone. Think of the best of Lane Mestepey.

On Saturday night, we saw a defensive basketball equivalent when LSU’s Garrett Temple put the clamps on Southeastern Louisiana’s Kevyn Green. Temple held Green, nearly a 20 ppg scorer, without so much as a shot attempt for more than 16 minutes at the start of the Tigers’ 90-61 win at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.

It doesn’t sound like that big of a deal. After all, this was just Southeastern Louisiana, not the Southeastern Conference. But don’t let that fool you. It was a remarkable feat of consistent effort and concentration that led to such a shut down.

Green is a fantastic catch-and-shoot scorer with good size and athleticism who entered the game with 41 3-pointers. And the Lions encourage shots by running him through screen after screen, cut after cut, all in an effort to lose the defender and get him open.

Never happened against Temple on Saturday.

Not once did Temple allow himself to get caught behind a screen. Not once did he lose Green in transition. Green wasn’t even tempted to so much as force up a shot over Temple for those first 16-plus minutes. It’s one thing if Temple had just held him scoreless. Shooters have off-nights. But to hold a guy who is a scorer and whose team works to try to get him shots without so much as a shot attempt … that’s being in a defensive “zone.”

Being 6-foot-6 and long-limbed certainly helped Temple. Being quick enough to stay with the 6-5 Green certainly didn’t hurt either. But such defense is just as much about being smart, getting help from teammates at the right time, and staying focused on the task at hand without ever letting your concentration slip.

Watching Temple and the Tigers defense at work, the point gets pounded home much more profoundly that defense is going to have to be the team’s identity going forward if the Tigers are going to have the season they hope to have in the SEC.

Certainly, Marcus Thornton is a remarkable scorer. Tasmin Mitchell is a low-post threat with his signature running hook and fade-away jumper moves and Bo Spencer can shoot from long range. But the Tigers depth of scorers runs out too quickly to call it a great offensive team. Mitchell is big and strong and Chris Johnson is a good shot-blocker, but they are too slender in the post and only have one inside scoring threat, so they don’t qualify as a team that can be called “big” or particularly “physical.”

LSU is a team that’s second in the SEC in points allowed and fourth in field-goal percentage defense. When the Tigers are good like they were Saturday or the previous Saturday against Washington State, it’s because they defend hard and they defend all game long.
This is a defensive team. Temple gave LSU fans a snapshot on just how good a defensive team the Tigers can be on Saturday.