Behind the Boxscore: Auburn

Coming into Saturday’s game I was worried LSU would suffer a letdown, blow the Auburn game and essentially squander its impressive win over Tennessee from the previous Saturday. No such letdown happened. In fact it was one of the most thorough beatings LSU has handed out all season.

3: Wins in a row

Just keep stringing together wins. LSU feels like a safe bet to make the NCAA Tournament, but the best way to guarantee that is by winning. They’ll need to score some more good wins in order to get off the 8/9 line and avoid a No. 1 seed in the second round. In most cases, who you draw matters more than anything and if LSU wants to make a lengthy run—and they absolutely have the talent to do so—they’ll need get up to at least a 7-seed.

104: Points scored

That’s a whole lot of points. A season-high and the most points LSU has scored against an SEC team since 1994. That’ll work!

12/10: Josh LeBlanc’s line

The best game of LeBlanc’s season by far. LSU’s bench has been lacking any kind of pulse offensively as of late, so it was a welcome change of pace Saturday to see LeBlanc spearhead a 20-point effort by the reserve. LSU averages 80 a game from essentially four players; if they can get reliable scoring from the bench I’m not sure there’s a team out there who can keep up with the Tigers offensively.

37/25: Auburn’s shooting numbers from the floor and three

Speaking of improvements, LSU is starting to show some life on the defensive end. Again, that should be concerning for the rest of the country.

Don’t look at Auburn scoring 80 points; they got 76 possessions, points were going to be had with that amount. Instead focus on this: Auburn barely averaged a point per possession and scored on less than half of those 80 possessions. LSU didn’t force that many turnovers relative to the amount of possessions either—12 turnovers on 80 possessions isn’t an absurd amount— LSU just did a great job of clamping down on not allowing Auburn good looks.

27: Cam Thomas points

Saturday featured two future first round picks in Thomas and Auburn’s Sharief Cooper and Thomas won the matchup going away. Thomas scored 27 points, hit half of his threes and was +18 on the floor; Cooper scored 26 but was 0-4 on his threes, had six turnovers and was -15

Yep. Cam Thomas is still that dude.