Observations: Auburn 92, Chattanooga 78
Even with a win, the Tigers missed an opportunity to show real improvement in Atlanta, and the pressure's on to respond before Purdue.
ATLANTA — There have been numerous times in recent years in which Auburn basketball could go through the motions and not give great effort, yet still find ways to take care of business and win comfortably.
Auburn currently does not have one of those teams.
The signs were there in a shootout exhibition loss to a new-look Oklahoma State, followed a short time later by an overtime escape in the season opener against a Bethune-Cookman team that was missing arguably its best player.
Most recently, lackluster performances turned what could have been at least competitive losses to elite teams like Michigan and Arizona into complete blowouts.
Auburn had another one of those games Saturday afternoon in Atlanta. While it turned out to be a 92-78 win over Chattanooga on the scoreboard, the final tally might have even been a little too kind toward Steven Pearl’s team.
“I’ve got to do a better job as their coach of getting these guys fired up to play in these types of games,” Pearl said afterwards. “One of the things you worry about with a team of 10 new guys: You’ve got to be able to win all the games you’re supposed to. That was a game we’re supposed to win.”
Not only was Auburn supposed to win — it was favored by nearly 20 points. Chattanooga was down its top three big men and missed a couple more guards due to injury. Chattanooga had previously lost to Saint Mary’s by 23 and UNLV by 32.
But Auburn needed a 12-0 run in the second half to go from Chattanooga nearly taking the lead to a double-digit advantage. Even then, the Mocs cut what had been a 16-point Tigers lead down to eight several times in the final minutes. Tahaad Pettiford scored eight points in the final 31 seconds just to get it to a 14-point win.
There was plenty that the first-year Auburn head coach didn’t like about what the Tigers put out Saturday, especially on defense. The recurring theme throughout his comments, though, was the subpar effort level.
“I thought we needed three good days of practice this week to get ready and prepare for a team that was going to come out and play with their hair on fire,” Pearl said. “And we didn’t get that, I don’t think. And that’s on us as a coaching staff. We’ve got to be able to get more out of our guys in practice, in these preparations and in these games.
“I thought we prepared like that, and we came out in the first five minutes like that. When you give a team like that confidence early in games — a team that has absolutely nothing to lose — it makes them believe they can stick around in the game, and, ultimately, they did.”
Even Chattanooga’s head coach suggested that Auburn’s players might have had a hard time getting up for this matchup. Chattanooga was banged up and was 2-5 against Division I opponents this season. For Auburn, this was an expected comfortable win between trips to play a pair of powerhouses.
But this is not an Auburn team that has earned that ability to coast. There’s not enough returning experience or continuity to fall back on that. These Tigers still have a ton of work to do in learning how to play with each other on both ends of the floor.
Because of that, they need to play with that old Pearl adage of “great effort and great energy.” Like the Arizona loss one week earlier, it felt like Auburn only did that in spurts instead of the expected 40 minutes.
That was enough for Pearl to point to Emeka Opurum, the JUCO center transfer who was ruled out for the season earlier in the day with an undisclosed medical issue, and say the Tigers’ play was “disrespectful” to its now-shutdown teammate.
“Our defense was horrible,” forward Keyshawn Hall remarked afterwards. “We just had to pick that up and get some intensity. We were moving around, nonchalant. We weren’t finishing plays. And then our offensive execution was bad, too. So we just had to pick those things up.
“We know what we can do. We know our potential when we do that. We just have to lock in and have that same effort throughout the whole game.”
As Pearl said, there shouldn’t be too much complaining after a win — especially one in which Auburn scored 90-plus points yet again. But the process was not encouraging.
“We’ve got to respond,” Pearl said. “Our whole message all year is: How do we get better? We’ve got to continuously get better. This last week, we just didn’t get better.”
Here are four Observations from Auburn’s 14-point win over Chattanooga, along with the Rotation Charts, Nerd Stats and Quote of the Night.
