The Stretch 4: A closer look at four Auburn basketball newcomers
With just one returning star, the Tigers are going to need a lot from some new faces. Here's what we heard from four of them.
AUBURN — Even with all the new for Auburn basketball, some things are getting old.
Every team hits it at some point in the preseason. For months and months, all you’ve done is face your teammates in practices. Every drill, every scrimmage, every open gym run — the cast of characters remains the same.
“We’ve been all just playing against each other for four or five months,” wing Elyjah Freeman said Thursday. “We’re just ready to play somebody else.”
The Tigers, with just one returning player from the best season in program history and without one legendary head coach who led them there, has had plenty to work on amongst themselves.
They’ve needed all this time, from the long summer to the fall practices that were turned on their head with Bruce Pearl’s retirement. They’ve had to create chemistry through heated competition with all these new faces.
“We’ve built that bond and built that relationship to where we know it’s all love, even if we’re competitive, even if we’re talking smack to one another,” fellow wing Abdul Bashir said. “We all know it’s all love, because we all know we built that relationship and built that bond in the last five months we’ve been here.”
The intensity level for Auburn under new head coach Steven Pearl has picked up over the last couple of weeks. There’s a light at the end of the preseason tunnel, and it’s approaching earlier than usual.
In less than a week, Auburn will have its first exhibition game of the season: A meeting with the Big 12’s Oklahoma State in historic Boutwell Auditorium in Birmingham. The Tigers will get to test themselves against a fellow high-major program and work on the lessons they learned from it for two weeks before facing Memphis in Atlanta.
“Just ready to work and ready to show everybody what we’ve been in the gym working on, because we know we’re a whole new team,” Freeman said.
It will be a highly anticipated, if unofficial, start to a new era for a team that has grown even closer together since fall practices began.
“I think the past two-and-a-half weeks, it’s been tremendous to see,” guard Kevin Overton said. “Maybe three weeks ago, we all were kinda like, man, what does this look like? BP retiring, a lot of crazy stuff going on. But I think, as a team, we really came together these last two weeks. It’s shown.”
Before Auburn got on the floor at the practice gym in Neville Arena on Thursday afternoon, four new Tigers — Freeman, Bashir, Overton and freshman Sebastian Williams-Adams — spoke to several media members.
With just a few days to go until some real action against someone else, here’s what we learned from this quartet of impact players for Auburn in our newest edition of The Stretch 4.
