Freshman Jontay Porter knew his team needed a win to cement its status as a likely NCAA Tournament team.
“I knew we were on the bubble,” Porter said. “We weren’t consistently checking the [Joe] Lunardi projections, but it was in our head that it was a must win.”
His Missouri Tigers did that on Saturday night, and then some.
On an emotional Saturday night in Columbia, the Tigers fit head coach Cuonzo Martin’s modus operandi, using rebounding and strong defense to will themselves to a 77-67 victory over the Arkansas Razorbacks.
Missouri (20-11, 10-8 Southeastern Conference) locked up the fifth seed in the SEC Tournament with the win. The team was picked to finish fifth in the conference preseason by SEC writers, before freshman phenom Michael Porter Jr. suffered a back injury in first game of the season against Iowa State. Porter Jr. has not played since then.
Martin said after the game that despite his occasional frustration with his team this season, he’s proud of how far they’ve come.
“It might not look like it, but I’m happy for our guys,” Martin said.
On Saturday, Missouri outrebounded Arkansas 37-25 and pulled in 11 offensive rebounds, leading to 15 second-chance points. Playing his final game at Mizzou Arena, Jordan Barnett led the onslaught on the boards, grabbing a team-high 11 rebounds to go with 19 points. Porter, who may have also played in his final regular season game in a Mizzou uniform, finished with 19 points, eight rebounds and four assists.
Porter was contemplative after the game and thanked his coach for what he’s done for Missouri thus far.
“I think [Martin’s] a perfect coach for the circumstances we had,” Porter said. “He’s never waivered. It’s not a roller coaster ride with him at all … It’s amazing what this team has done despite losing the best player in the country.”
Saturday’s game had many of the hallmarks of this year’s Mizzou team: slow starts to both halves, double-digit turnovers, struggles dealing with pressure on the ball. But the team did not give in down the stretch, battling for loose balls, making free throws and hitting shots when it counted. The Tigers finished 27 of 33 from the free-throw line, an 82 percent clip, and scraped and clawed their way to four blocks and three steals as a team.
Missouri needed all the mental toughness it could muster to pull out the win. The team shot just 42 percent from the field and also played the final 14:21 with seven available players after junior Cullen VanLeer fell on his knee and limped off the floor and into the locker room. After the game, Martin said VanLeer tore his ACL.
While Missouri showed off its learned tenacity all game, no possession reinforced it more than the one that ended on a Barnett 3-pointer with 1:10 left in the game. With Missouri leading by 9, Barnett pulled down a defensive rebound, slowed the game down on the offensive end and passed to Porter, who pulled the defense in to him before hitting Barnett for a 3 that put the nail in Arkansas’ proverbial coffin. The play electrified a sold out crowd and gave Missouri the breathing room it needed to coast to a win.
With regular season play complete, Missouri will now turn its sights to the SEC Tournament and improving its NCAA Tournament seeding. The team will play either Georgia or Vanderbilt on Thursday at 2:30 p.m. in St. Louis. If the team wins that game, it will play Kentucky at 2:30 p.m. on Friday.
_Edited by Bennett Durando | bdurando@themaneater.com_
