Pushing the tempo

Missouri coach Mike Anderson has said his players will thank him one day for the amount of running they do in practice.

Sunday might have been one of those days.

Playing its third game in three days, Missouri appeared to be lacking energy in the first half. The Tigers committed 11 turnovers and trailed Stetson, 27-25, at halftime. The Tigers were letting the Hatters, a team that prefers to slow the game down, play their tempo.

“I don’t think we came out with the blast like we did the last game,” center Kalen Grimes said. “In the second half, we picked it up.”

Missouri easily made up the deficit, outscoring the Hatters, 41-18, in the second half to win, 66-45, at Mizzou Arena. After shooting 37 percent in the first half, Missouri shot 51.7 percent in the second. But, more important for Anderson, it was the defense that changed the game.

“I thought we executed defensively the best, probably, we have all year,” Anderson said. “We were stifling everywhere.”

Missouri (3-0) executed its defense enough to hold Stetson to 25 percent shooting from the floor in the second half. Whatever Anderson said to his players at halftime was carried out on Norm Stewart Court.

“Sometimes you just need that good talking-to,” forward Marshall Brown said. “He got on us, but he didn’t really raise his voice. But he did get on us.”

Guard Jason Horton said that it was nothing Anderson said that got Missouri to increase its energy in the second half. Instead, that it was a choice made by Horton and his teammates.

“We just wanted to,” Horton said. “We felt like we played the worst half we have so far. We just wanted to come out and be the team that we know we are.”

The team that Missouri thinks it is, they say, is one that traps its opponents into making mistakes, a team that runs faster and for longer amounts of time than the team wearing the other colors. For the game’s last 20 minutes on Sunday, the Tigers were who they think they are.

“They ramped it up a bit,” Stetson coach Derek Waugh said. “They may have worn us down a little bit. Maybe they wore us down mentally a little more than physically because just facing that pressure all the time, maybe we lost our focus.”

Part of Anderson’s emphasis in conditioning his players is making sure physical fatigue doesn’t turn into mental fatigue. And after playing 100 minutes of basketball in a weekend, a high amount of turnovers could have been expected in the second half. Instead, Missouri had only two.

“I thought our guys got through the mental part of it,” Anderson said. “This being our third game, sometimes you can feel sorry for yourself, but you still have to play the game. We had some guys that came in and gave us an injection shot. And before you knew it, the energy level started (going up) and you saw us all over the floor.”

One player that Anderson said helped change the flow of the game was forward Darryl Butterfield. A day after missing Missouri’s game against Army with a sore back, Butterfield scored one point and had four rebounds. While his numbers would not seem to stand out, Anderson said Butterfield’s contributions are more intangible.

“He’s an energy guy. I think he’s a conditioned player,” Anderson said. “He can be that guy to be an enforcer for us. He’s like a kamikaze, going up for rebounds, trying to get charges. He played with a relentlessness.”

Butterfield was on the floor when Missouri took control of the game, with the Tigers opening the second half with a 13-2 run to take a 38-29 lead.

“He gave us the energy that we needed,” guard Stefhon Hannah said. “Everybody fed off of that. It was a big turning point in the game.”