Observations: Auburn 84, Missouri 68
It wasn't always sharp. It wasn't ever close, either. The Tigers did their job on both ends to open SEC play with a comfortable win.
(Zach Bland/Auburn Tigers)
AUBURN — Let’s talk about the Auburn basketball family.
Not the Auburn Family™, the catch-all term for the fan base and beyond. No, let’s talk about the literal Auburn basketball family.
The 2024-25 Tigers have a chance to do something special. According to several predictive metrics, Auburn is currently the best-performing team at this point in the season in at least a decade and a half. It ran through the toughest non-conference schedule in program history with just one loss and is now projected to win potentially the toughest conference in modern college basketball history.
The chemistry just radiates from this team, both on and off the floor. Auburn has an All-American center and several players who would be volume-heavy leading scorers on a large number of teams across the country. Bruce Pearl maximized the amount of returning experience on a squad that also made some necessary upgrades.
Instead of hunting for individual glory, this brotherhood of basketball spreads the wealth offensively and demands total buy-in defensively. It’s a rare thing.
“We share the ball, and we love each other,” power forward Chaney Johnson said.
Without getting too melodramatic, that sense of love is real. It’s how a team can handle an altercation between two newcomers before a monster road test early in the season and make it feel like it never even happened. It’s how a team with so many weapons can thrive without anyone getting jealous or stat-hungry.
It’s what makes Pearl wax poetic after an 84-68 win over Missouri in an SEC opener about the parents of his players as much as the players themselves.
“Kids still want to be coached,” Pearl said. “They want to be held accountable. They want to be disciplined. It does help. I believe it helps our society when we have both parents in the home, if it can happen. It does. And some of our children are great beneficiaries. I'm grateful for my parents. I've got great parents. I've had so many great parents, but this is a good group of parents right now.”
That’s the Auburn basketball family, and it conducted some family business Saturday.
Auburn trailed Missouri — a team that had only lost two close games to quality competition all season and also beaten preseason No. 1 Kansas — by a grand total of 21 seconds.
When Johni Broome popped a 3-pointer to give Auburn a lead with 15:56 left in the first half, it started a 23-8 run that ensured Missouri would be down by 14 or more for almost all of the final 25 minutes of action. The 17-3 run to open the second half was just standard operating procedure for Auburn.
Even when Auburn didn’t play its sharpest brand of basketball — giving up too many offensive rebounds in the first half, turning it over too often in the second half — it didn’t really matter. When it mattered most, the Tigers did their job.
And it ensured Auburn would open a brutal 18-game conference gauntlet with a win.
“We have a special team,” Broome said. “I think it’s our foundation. That's a good way to start it off, but we’re not satisfied with just this game. We know we want to keep going and keep setting the tone.”
Here are four Observations from Auburn’s 16-point win over Missouri, along with the Rotation Charts, Nerd Stats and Quote of the Night.
(David Gray/Auburn Tigers)