TRANSCRIPT: Everything Chris Beard Said About Ole Miss’ 77-65 win over LSU

OXFORD, Miss. — Ole Miss men’s basketball defeated LSU, 77-65, Saturday afternoon at the SJB Pavilion. Ole Miss is 3-0 to begin conference play for the first time since the 2018-19 season.

Malik Dia had the hot hand for the Rebels this week leading the way with 19 points and seven rebounds. It marks back-to-back games the big man has led in points and on the glass.

Five Rebels scored in double-figures: Dia (21), Jaemyn Brakefield (16), Sean Pedulla (11), Dre Davis (10), and Jaylen Murray (10). It marks the fourth game this year five Rebels have reached double-digit points.

After the game, head coach Chris Beard met with media to discuss Ole Miss’ win. Here’s everything Coach Beard had to say.

Question: Chris, you guys have been pretty consistently been able to turn defense into offense, even when maybe shots aren’t necessarily falling for you with the regularity you want them to. It looks like you’re able to stifle them defensively, and that’s leading to some easier buckets.

Coach Beard: Yeah, I think again, our half court defense tonight when we got back on defense and didn’t let them score on the 0 or 1 passes, we did some really good things. You know, if our transition defense would have been a little bit tighter, it would have been one of our better defensive performances. So that’s a talented player with a really good coach. So yeah, I think we played some good defense tonight. Certainly, you know, I believe to win in March, your offense has to have diversity. It has to have variety. You can’t just score in one way. So, something we talk about all the way back in the summer, you know, if we’re going to get to that point-per-game goal, we have to score off our defense. We have to get to the free throw line. We have to score in transition. We have to score with half court execution. We have to get some points off of offensive rebounds, second chances. But tonight I think, you know, we made the opponent turn the ball over more than we did and that was an important part of the game.

Question: Talk about a low-turnover second half. Just from your vantage point with those turnovers in the first half, were they more you feel like self-inflicted or something that LSU was doing.

Coach Beard: Yeah I think it’s like good news, bad news. The bad news is to me, it’s like talented veteran players making non-basketball turnovers, casual, lazy, turnovers that I think, you know, a really good player makes once a month. And so the good news is, if we can ever clean that up, if we can cut it in half, if we can have some guys start embracing games. And so tonight’s game with Brakefield a great example. Brake’s aggressive. He’s prepared to play. He was locked in. He really wanted to win this game. But his three first half turnovers, it’s almost like he’s trying too much. You know the baseline out of bounds play, where he faked the handoff, dribbling into traffic a couple of times and trying to thread a needle on a home-run play. We just need base hits. Base hits. So I’ve coached some teams before where we needed some home run plays. You know, we needed a certain player to put on his Superman cape, but not this team. We have talented players, like if we’ll just come out and play the game, have a leading scorer, different every game, kind of take what the defense gives us. So the turnover game, you know we call it just basketball turnovers. Those are going to happen. But the non-basketball turnovers, the casual plays, the lazy plays, those are the ones that we’re working really hard to try to improve.

Question: You mentioned Mikeal (Brown-Jones) being out. Do you have any kind of an update on how how long he’s out?

Coach Beard: Yeah, he’s in concussion protocol. And so, those things are a lot different than when Keith Carter played, I’ll tell you that. I played a little football growing up, and I never heard that word. We’ve got great trainers and great doctors, and Mikeal is as tough as any player I’ve ever coached, so he’s doing everything he can doctors, trainers, communicating around the clock. He’s progressing in the right direction, so we’re hoping he can play sooner than later. And again, just recognizing we’ve had some people step up during his absence, you know, to win two SEC games without Mikeal, there’s something good going on with our team.

Question: Chris, three straight games where you’ve had really strong second half performances. How encouraged are you by that in this league? But what more do you want to see in the first half?

Coach Beard: Well, I thought the first four minutes of tonight’s game was a better start. The second four-minute game, I think it was  a 9-0 run LSU. That was disappointing. But maybe we took a little bit of a step in the right direction tonight. We came out ready to play, and so that’s something we talk about. You know, we, call winning time the end of the game. We spent a lot of time talking about winning time, and so the first of the game needs to become winning time around here. So I’m trying really hard to get the players to to understand that.

Question: Chris, with I think five guys in double digit points, just what does that show you what this team is capable of?

Coach Beard: It’s Ole miss basketball. It’s by design. You know I don’t think you can win six games in three weekends with one dominant leading scorer. You’ve got to have scoring in different ways. You know if we can play good defense, take care of the ball and have, you know, multiple guys in double figure scoring that we’ve proven that we can, you know, be more than competitive over the years.

Question: Chris, I was thinking back to talking to you after the Memphis game. And when we were talking about rebounding since SEC play has started, it’s been virtually even, one rebound margins, nothing to hang a banner about. But is that a good spot for this team to be or at least an okay spot?

Coach Beard: Maybe we should hang a banner, you know? Yeah, we’ll see. And I’m positive about that because I believe that George is a good rebounding team. I know that Arkansas has length and athleticism. And tonight’s LSU team has some legitimate bigs. I mean, 10 is a once-in-a-lifetime athlete, when you get a coach, a guy like that. Eleven is a hard-playing, physical guy. No. 6 is a talented freshman. So it’s a good offensive rebounding team. Four, I think, from the perimeter. So this team had three of the best offensive rebounders in our league, and so I don’t know we’ll see how we stack up. But we got to continue to get better at rebounding. I think the guys are embracing it. As a coach, it’s always good to hear during the timeouts the players talking about the things that matter. You know, these timeouts are kind of long in college basketball. I don’t have two minutes worth of content, and I’m not a big yeller screamer with this veteran group, so a lot of times in these timeouts, there’s just a lot of dialogue. But I think the players are talking about different things than they were talking about on opening night. And in my opinion, they’re talking about the right things and one of those being, ‘hey, where are we at with the rebounding game?’ So player accountability is getting a little bit better. You know, a guy misses a block out, his teammates are getting a piece of him before I can. And that’s always a good sign.

Question: That LSU’s guards number five and number one were pretty inefficient in the second half. Did you do any adjustments to make their lives a little bit more difficult?

Coach Beard: Yeah, I think fortune always plays into basketball. I think there’s some shots that they took that they normally make. But I do think you give our guys some credit. We try to just stay between the ball and the basket against those guys. You know, we were prepared to give up some really talented step back type shots. We had a second layer game plan ready for that. But I thought we did a pretty good job containing the ball tonight against two talented players. Those guys are good one on one players. They can create their own shot at any time. So I do think we played some pretty good containment defense at times tonight.