Time Out for November 11, 2009

• By GARY LANEY
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Nov 11, 2009 - Page: 1C

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The one thing that couldn’t happen to LSU’s basketball season has already happened.

And we haven’t even tipped off the first game yet.

In Sunday’s closed-door scrimmage at the University of Houston, LSU lost guard Alex Farrer for basically the rest of the calendar year, if not more, with a dislocated left kneecap.

“It happened three minutes into the scrimmage,” said coach Trent Johnson on Tuesday, three days before LSU’s season-opener Friday against the University of Louisiana at Monroe at the PMAC. “It was unlike anything I’ve seen.”

Farrer was simply guarding his man away from the ball when he made a cut and suffered the injury that Johnson said will sideline him for at least six weeks.

Tough break for Farrer, a fifth-year senior who has stuck with the program as a career reserve and appeared ready to take on an expanded role as one of the team’s veterans. And a tough break from the Tigers, who were going into a season with only nine scholarship players available. With Farrer out, that number is down to eight.

In terms of minutes distribution, this is definitely a player’s market.

Johnson said if he were playing, he’d think “‘God dang, I have old coach right where I need him,’” Johnson said. “He can’t take me out. I get to play all the time.”

That’s certainly the case, but only if the player is healthy enough to take the court. With Farrer out, that means freshman Aaron Dotson will go from learning behind Farrer to learning on the court. But because Dotson has his own injury issues, Chris Bass will have to be ready to play in tandem with Bo Spencer in a two point-guard lineup. Zach Kinsley will go from being a walk-on wing who might have to play to one who will have to play.

Johnson said Kinsley, a 6-foot-5 St. Michael graduate, was LSU’s second-leading scorer against Houston.

But that was without Farrer and forward Garret Green, who has missed three practices and the Houston scrimmage after taking a fall in the Tigers’ first scrimmage against South Alabama. And it was without a completely healthy Dotson, whose knee injury that required surgery in February still robs him of the explosiveness that made him a player who played, in Johnson’s words, “in the air.”

If you’re counting, that’s three out of the nine scholarship players dealing with injuries and at least one walk-on you can pretty much count on being in the rotation this year.

All this doesn’t necessarily doom LSU to a bad season. Dotson can gain experience while Farrer is out and get used to, in Johnson’s words “playing without his legs.” That could make LSU deeper when Farrer, who can’t use a redshirt this season because he already used one during LSU’s Final Four run in 2006, returns.