The Missouri Tigers hit San Juan, Puerto Rico for the first real test of the 2008-09 basketball season. Mizzou is off to a 2-and-0 start, having beaten Prairie View A&M and Chattanooga by a combined 46 points. But is this Tiger team ready for prime time? Fans are about to find out.
The Puerto Rico Tipoff offers Mike Anderson's squad a chance to make an early season statement that perhaps this season really will be different. The first round opponent is Xavier, which is coming off a 2007-08 season in which it won a school record 30 games and made the Elite Eight before bowing out to UCLA. It may still seem a little strange to say, but a program like Xavier has now become a measure stick for Missouri, not the other way around.
The Tigers have offered glimpses of hope that perhaps they're better than Anderson's first two teams. Marcus Denmon is instant offense, putting up 36 points in the Black and Gold game and then 13 more in just 19 minutes in his first real action. Leo Lyons and DeMarre Carroll have been dominant up front, which they should be against teams like Prairie View and Chattanooga. Matt Lawrence looked like he might have found his long-missing jump shot against the Mocs.
Missouri played 15 minutes of the best basketball we've seen under Anderson. And they weren't doing it by throwing in three-pointers on every possession, which is a very good sign. But we don't really know a single thing about this team. How will they play against good competition? Is Lyons ready to play a full season rather than two games on and two games off? Can Zaire Taylor run a high-major team at the point guard position? Do any of the freshmen outside of Denmon have enough to contribute early on? We'll start to get some answers to all of those questions tomorrow.
I'll say one thing for this team: It's a lot easier to root for. For the first time in three years, I saw flashes of a team that looked like it had an idea how to play Anderson's up-tempo pressing defense. I saw a team that has two players in the frontcourt who give Missouri legitimate opposition to a defense in the paint. But more important than that, I saw kids who appear to want to play hard for Anderson and have an actual desire to represent the University of Missouri.
In the post-game press conference, Carroll, Lyons, Taylor and Lawrence were joking and smiling. They seem to like each other. Denmon and Kimmie English went to the sidelines and got chewed on by the coach a little bit and they didn't react by rushing to the end of the bench to pout.
As much as, perhaps more than, anything that's happened on the court over the last five seasons, the players at Missouri have just been really hard to root for. I'm not going to call any of them out by name, but they haven't been kids that got the fans on their side. Perhaps that changes this year.
To make the trip to Puerto Rico a success, the Tigers need to come out with two wins. In a field that includes Xavier, Virginia Tech, USC and Memphis, it's not an easy goal, but it's a reachable one. If Mizzou comes back home at 4-and-1, there may be reason for optimism this season. Not that anyone will be at Mizzou Arena to notice, but that's another issue for another day.
Gabe DeArmond is the publisher of PowerMizzou.com. You can read his daily coverage of Tiger football and basketball online at http://missouri.rivals.com.