BATON ROUGE – The LSU Tigers basketball team can’t afford a Thanksgiving food hangover as they take to the court Friday night at 7 p.m. at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center against North Florida.
LSU will be looking to continue the momentum the team established in the final two games of the Charleston Classic after defeating North Texas and Wake Forest in overtime to finish 2-1 in the multi-team event.
Tickets for the game are available at LSUTix.net but there is a special buy one, get one free offer for those who purchase tickets Friday night at the Maravich Center box office on the upper concourse. For $10 a fan can purchase a ticket and get another ticket for the game free. The box office opens an hour prior to the game at 6 p.m.
The contest, which starts a busy two days of athletic activities with football on Saturday, will be broadcast on the affiliates of the LSU Sports Radio Network (Guaranty Media Baton Rouge flagship Eagle 98.1 FM) with the Voice of the Tigers Chris Blair and former head coach John Brady. Lyn Rollins and Victor Howell will have the coverage on the streaming video broadcast on SECN+.
LSU is 3-2 overall and has continued to find success inside with center Will Baker. The graduate student had his second 20-plus point game in the first five on Sunday against Wake Forest, scoring 23 points. He leads the Tigers in scoring and rebounds at 16.0 points and 6.2 rebounds a contest.
Jordan Wright is also in double figure scoring at 10.8 points a contest and 2.0 assists per game, while sophomore Jalen Reed is at 10.6 points and 4.6 rebounds. Reed has had three double figure scoring games to open the season.
North Florida is 4-2 overall and will be making its fourth appearance in the Maravich Center in the past decade. The most memorable game in the series came in 2015 when the Ospreys scored 56 points in the first half to take a halftime advantage thanks to 10 three-pointers. In the second half, the Tigers dominated in the paint and scored 71 points en route to a 119-108 victory.
It appears the three-pointer is again a part of North Florida’s arsenal.
“North Florida is about +24 in their games from the three-point line, they make around 11 a game, shooting about 35% and they really do a good job running teams off the three-point line. Their opponents are only making about three threes a game, only shooting around 13 a game, which is an incredibly low number in today’s college basketball,” said Coach Matt McMahon at his Wednesday media session. “We know they are going to shoot a lot of threes, so those long rebounds that have given us trouble early in the season, we want to see some improvement there. On the offensive end, we want to continue to be more efficient and I think the way we do that is to eliminate some of the unforced turnovers we’ve had.”
Chaz Lanier leads North Florida, averaging 17.8 points a game while Jah Nze is at 11.0 points. Lanier has made 21 three-pointers is shooting 45.7 percent from distance, while two other players are shooting 48 percent or better from outside the arc.
This will be the first of two Friday nights that LSU will play at home as the Tigers will host Southeastern next Friday, Dec. 1 at 7 p.m. Between the two home games, LSU will play Tuesday at Syracuse in the ACC/SEC Challenge.