Nashville–Missouri has the greatest motivator in college basketball on its side.
Five of the Tigers’ rotational pieces know that when they lose their last game, that will be it. For their seasons and for their careers as a whole. The eligibility clock will run out at the end of this season for Tamar Bates, Marquis Warrick, Caleb Grill, Tony Perkins and Josh Gray.
The five are guaranteed just two more college basketball games. All the bus rides will end. They’ll have to do all “MIZ” chants from the crowd instead of the floor. There will be no more practice or team lifts. In a few weeks, everything will be different for the Tigers’ veteran core.
“You don’t get this opportunity for the rest of your life,” Grill told Southeastern 16. “We understand if we lose we’re done.”
Missouri’s group clearly doesn’t want to be done. They want to keep playing together. They want to see how far they can take this thing. They don’t want the bus rides to end. They don’t want to stop spending nights in the locker room, which Gray commands with his powerful voice. They don’t want to stop playing.
As a result, they’re going out there with a heightened level of focus and a healthy dose of desperation.
“You can see it in the play of the guys who are in their last year of eligibility,” Bates told Southeastern 16. “Looking in their eyes and the intensity they’re playing with and the communication on the defense…We just know we got to bring a certain type of intensity.”
“It’s just a different feeling, a different energy,” Missouri assistant coach Charlton Young added.
Missouri–a projected seven seed in Joe Lunardi’s updated bracketology projection–doesn’t want to sit around and mope as a result of its season potentially coming to an end soon. It believes that it can go anywhere it wants to as long as it buys in.
Gray has continued to harp on that message, particularly after Missouri’s three-game losing streak that ended on Thursday. That didn’t hit the standard for the veteran big man. In any way.
“If this is as far as we want to go, then just let me know,” Gray said to the team, “[Then] I won’t be as emotional.”
Turns out the rest of Missouri’s roster is emotional, too. Dennis Gates’ Tigers took down Mississippi State in Thursday’s second round of the SEC Tournament. When Mississippi State threw a punch, Gray and Missouri responded.
When the Tigers needed to look like a group of old guys who didn’t want their careers to end, they fit the bill. Missouri’s five guys with expiring eligibility combined for 56 points on Thursday night with two of them going for 20 or more, they shot a combined 47.4% from the field and bigger than all; they played as if they knew they were going to–and had to–win.
“We don’t take any game for granted because we only have two more guaranteed games,” Gray said. “For people with one year left this means a lot. You always gotta go out with a bang.”
“We want to be on this team as long as we can,” Warrick added.
The way that this group operates could allow for Warrick and Gray’s wish to come true. These guys share it. They’re physical. They know how to win. They appear to embody what a veteran group is.
A veteran group finds a way to respond after three straight losses. A veteran group can pressure a good Mississippi State team into shooting just 36.4% from the field.
Missouri’s veteran nature has shown the whole way, not just Thursday. They’re the rare example of a group that has found its identity and has played to it.
Gates’ team is No. 5 in the nation in KenPom’s offensive efficiency metric, is eighth in steal percentage and is 45th in turnovers forced. They’re also 34th in the country in Division-I experience. They don’t believe all those stats coinciding is an accident.
“I would definitely say [there’s] some desperation,” Bates said. “We have guys who have played in so many big time games that the guys on the floor, we know how to execute down the stretch.”
Missouri’s roster has just the 225th highest minute continuity in the country, but in some ways the type of experience that it has is more beneficial than the continuity that it’s missing. Bates has played in front of the environments that come with playing for Indiana at Assembly Hall. Veteran forward Mark Mitchell has started on an ACC Championship team at Duke. Perkins has played in the BIG 10 Title Game as Iowa’s point guard, too.
“It allows you to have that experience of what it takes and what it looks like to be a champion,” Perkins told Southeastern 16. “We lost a couple of games. Oh, well we’re coming back, bouncing back. We gotta be ready for the next battle. We gotta be ready tonight, we gotta be ready tomorrow.”
Looks like Missouri is going to be ready the rest of the way as it tries to keep its season–as well as the career of its old guys–alive. It believes it can.
“I really think the ceiling is the Final Four,” Gray said. “We can make it to San Antonio.”
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