All of a sudden, it’s been 11 years since the University of Missouri men’s basketball team won an NCAA Tournament game — the longest such drought in the program since it failed to so much as qualify for the tournament between 1944 and 1976.
Since then, the Tigers have lost five straight in NCAA postseason play and will receive just their third berth since 2013 on Selection Sunday. That’s regardless of what takes place in the Southeastern Conference tournament beginning at 6 p.m. Thursday in Nashville, where seventh-seeded MU (15-8 overall, 8-8 in the SEC) will take on No. 10 seed Georgia (14-11, 7-11).
But even if the SEC tourney isn’t a “playing for your life, so to speak,” event to salvage an NCAA bid, as MU coach Cuonzo Martin put it on Wednesday, it’s also not some irrelevant triviality.
Mizzou needs to seize this moment as a springboard, or at least a building block.
Not just in terms of enhancing its credentials and seeding for the NCAA Tournament but also to restore some mojo among a group that started the season in exhilarating form but has been trending in exasperating fashion lately.
This team is veteran and versatile and flashed enough potential and highlights along the way to suggest it’s capable of unfurling something meaningful this postseason. But it’s also exhibited a maddening trait of letting victories dissolve away.
In many ways, Martin’s finest hours have been in the year since the pandemic shut down sports and through his inspired leadership in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. That’s been an enlightening reminder that winning games isn’t the only measure of a college coach.
Even so, it’s obviously a major element of the job. And if this isn’t a case of now or never in Martin’s fourth season at MU, it seems at least a matter of … if not now, when?
And with that comes a simple question of which version of Mizzou will emerge:
The one that started the season 7-0 and has beaten three current top 10 teams among nine victories over foes likely to be in the NCAA Tournament? Or the alter ego that has lost five of the last seven (including two losses without forward Jeremiah Tilmon) and has appeared more ripe for an early knockout than a memorable run?
We won’t know what that signature of the season holds until NCAA play begins next week in Indianapolis, of course. And we also know that teams don’t have to excel in their conference tournament to thrive in the NCAA … and that teams that flourish in conference tournaments aren’t guaranteed any path forward.
But the next few days seem particularly vital for a team stranded between identities like Mizzou.
Every loss this season, Martin believes, provided evidence of what can be corrected instead of revealing fatal flaws. Many coaches might say this sort of thing, naturally, but his conviction in saying it compels us to take stock.
Assuming it’s true, now would be a fine time to flex the basics that enabled MU to seem so intriguing earlier in the season. As pointed to by Martin, that means defense, rebounding, moving the ball, concentration, attention to detail, etc.
All of that can go a long way towards winning when shots don’t fall. And shots haven’t fallen much in the last few weeks, to be sure.
“When we play as a whole,” Martin said, “we’re as good as anybody.”
To develop that, or any sense of momentum into NCAA play, MU figures to be best-served by shrugging off another habit.
The ghosts of SEC tournaments past in theory have no bearing on this season. Just the same, it’s easy to see a correlation between the recent NCAA Tournament futility and how the Tigers have performed previously at this stage.
Since winning their farewell Big 12 tournament in 2012 (only to days later tumble as a No. 2 seed against 15th-seeded Norfolk State), MU has won just four SEC tourney games in eight seasons.
Even considering the Tigers didn’t play last year as the pandemic shut it down and that they sat out in 2016 as part of self-imposed sanctions, the 4-6 SEC tournament record isn’t at all what anyone would have supposed when MU made the jump from the Big 12.
And it’s a microcosm of how the program has fared in that span.
So best Mizzou makes good Thursday on what junior forward Mitchell Smith said about a certain something building since its game against Texas A&M was canceled a year ago.
“I feel like we’ve still got the energy from last year,” he said.
If the future is to be now, Mizzou can ill-afford a loss to Georgia, which beat the Tigers 80-70 in their previous meeting in their second straight loss with Tilmon taking a leave of absence because of a death in the family.
A victory would be no assurance toward MU ending its long NCAA Tournament string of defeats.
But it at least would be a path to winning a second SEC tournament game for the first time … and with that perhaps a gateway toward finding the best of itself at the right time of year for the first time in forever.
