No. 22 LSU battles past LA Tech, 74-67, to stay unbeaten

BATON ROUGE – The 22nd-ranked LSU Tigers concluded their four-game season opening homestand on Friday night with a 74-67 win over Louisiana Tech to move to 4-0 and extend its home win streak to 11 games.

LSU, under head coach Will Wade, is out to a 4-0 start for the first time since 2012. The squad will travel for the first time this season for the AdvoCare Invitational in Orlando, Florida. Things get started on Thanksgiving night against Charleston on ESPNU.

With a five-point LSU lead at halftime, Louisiana Tech began the second half on a 21-8 run and led by as many as eight ahead of the under-12 minute media timeout. The Tigers tied the game with 9:33 left in the second and only relinquished their lead once for the remainder of the game.

Ja’vonte Smart paced the team with a career-best 16 points. Tremont Waters, Skylar Mays and Daryl Edwards also finished with double-digit scoring nights.

The Tigers finished the night 29-of-64 from the field and shot just 57.9 percent from the free throw line and 20.8 percent from three.

LSU vs. Louisiana Tech Quotes
November 16, 2018

LSU head coach Will Wade

Opening statement…
“Good team win. Found a way to get it done. Still have some things we need to work on and improve. At the end of the day, the goal was to be 4-0 and we’re 4-0. Competition is getting ready to kick up as we head to Orlando. We need to get better these next couple of days in practice. I did think our defense was improved. We were better. We didn’t move the ball as well as we needed to on offense, but we can get some of that stuff corrected. Our defensive rebounding was exposed a little bit tonight. I thought it would be. We’ll get back and figure things out and improve and get better.

On Daryl Edwards 12-point performance tonight…
“It was awesome. I thought our two seniors really, really helped us. Kavell’s (Bigby-Williams) tip-in, I thought Kavell played great. I thought Daryl (Edwards) played his best game, certainly this year and maybe since he’s been here. Twelve points in 19 minutes, two assists, no turnovers. He was aggressive at the end of the press. I knew we were going to need guys to step up. I knew Naz (Reid) was banged up. Just didn’t know how much he could do today. He tried to give it a go. I knew we needed some other guys to be able to step up and carry some of that slack. I thought Daryl was well positioned to do that and he did that.”

LA Tech head coach Eric Konkol

Opening statement:

“Our guys came here fully expecting to win. We are disappointed that we fell short of that. No question, I thought we played really, really hard. It was the turnovers for us. We left a lot of shots out on the court by not taking care of the basketball enough. You have to give LSU credit because they did a lot of things to make that challenging tonight.”

On overcoming early deficits:

“I thought it showed a lot of maturity and toughness from our group to play possession by possession and try to make the next right play and find some baskets to go on a little run. We can take that from here. Again, we have to clean up our turnovers throughout the entire game to be able to come away with a win from a game like this.”

On the individual performances:

“I thought our sophomores, Anthony Duruji and Exavian Christon in particular, really grew up tonight. We really rode Duruji in the second half, not giving him many breaks. He rebounded, he was able to find some spots on the floor. He had a really nice game tonight. The same thing with Exavian. He missed practice yesterday with illness and wasn’t 100 percent sure he was going to play, but I knew he was not going to miss a game like this. He really battled for us.”