In the first game of the Arizona Tipoff (the game was still in Columbia), South Carolina basketball beat VMI on Monday to move to 3-0 on the young season. The game was not one of the finest Gamecock basketball performances in recent memory, but USC managed to do enough to win the game despite some really ugly stretches of basketball.
The Gamecocks really struggled to shoot the basketball most of the night as they finished the game making just 35% of their shots and just 30% of their 3-pointers. They erased some of the misses with a great performance on the offensive glass led by BJ Mack and Benjamin Bosmans-Verdonk.
Lamont Paris’ team didn’t lack effort on Monday night, but they didn’t execute as well as they would have liked defensively and couldn’t consistently put the ball in the basket on offense. Playing against a VMI team that could struggle this season helped cover some of the warts from Monday’s contest.
BJ Mack had his highest-effort performance of the young season, and it showed on the stat sheet. The big man had a double-double with 17 points, 13 rebounds, and 3 steals. No one else had a good game offensively, but Benjamin Bosmans-Verdonk had a good day on the glass, and Ta’Lon Cooper did a good job of finding open teammates with solid passing.
A hot stretch near the end of the 1st half makes the numbers for the game look a little better than they felt in real-time, and South Carolina basketball fans have to be pleased that such a poor offensive performance still resulted in 74 points.
The Gamecocks pulled off the victory 74-64.
In the end, South Carolina basketball is 3-0, officially getting off to a better start than they did in Year 1 of the Lamont Paris era.