Did you really think Arkansas would keep losing?
After an unprecedented four-game losing streak, Mike Anderson kept preaching patience and, at least Wednesday night, his patience paid off.
For those fans who gave up in the first half, they missed a young team doing exactly what Anderson has said when it started clicking and the result was a 72-60 win Wednesday night.
“It’s good for their psyche,” Anderson said later about getting the win, their first in three weeks. “Our guys know they’re a good basketball team, but we’ve come up short.”
And while Isaiah Joe broke out with a 23-point effort and Daniel Gafford scored 13 and four of his 10 rebounds on the offensive end, it was the defense Anderson thought made the difference.
“It was triggered by our defense,” he said. “The push to the basketball, whether it was makes or miss, we did those things. Even when we made mistakes we just played through it.”
That’s something this team hasn’t done in a few weeks.
Against the Tigers this defense finally forced turnovers (24 for the game to the Hogs’ 14) and dominated the steals (13 to 2).
“For 40 minutes we tried to create tempo and the tempo was created by our defense,” Anderson said. “(The bench) really kind of changed the tempo defensively, just really getting after it, getting in lanes and getting steals and getting to the basket and getting to our defense.”
One of the big players aiding that defense was Reggie Chaney, who didn’t pile up particularly big numbers in any category, but did create a lot of pressure that led to some of those defensive stats.
“He’s figuring it out,” Anderson said. “I’m finally figuring it out. He played really big. He continues to get better and better and better.
“And then he comes up, he deflects passes and we come up with them. That’s big and he can switch out and guard a guard. His impact on this team is very, very important. We want to put him in a position where he helps us.”
Gafford has been talking about Chaney for weeks and what he brings to the team defensively.
“Every time, Reggie brings that extra piece to the puzzle,” he said. “He gets hustle plays, he always has his hands in the passing lanes. He is touching passes that I am sure that neither one of us (Gafford and Joe at the postgame press conference) can even touch when we are playing our best defense.
“I mean, he comes in and he rebounds and he was missing layups today, but he is always around the basket getting easy looks. I like the way he attacks the basket. He attacks the basket like a monster.”
As for Gafford, who has struggled at times getting into foul trouble, he played the entire game without getting a single foul.
Gafford also hit what Anderson later called the biggest shot of the night when he threw up a shot at the buzzer to give the Hogs a 34-32 lead at halftime.
“I ain’t never hit a shot like that before,” Gafford said. “When Keyshawn (Embery-Simpson) passed it, if the guy would have never dug in and hit the ball out of my hands, I would have had a better shot, but I knew time was running down and there was like at last two seconds, so I just threw it up and I was just trying to hit backboard and it just went straight in.
“I was amazed. I thought I was just going to air ball it, but I just threw it up and it wasn’t going to touch rim and it didn’t touch rim, it just went straight in.”
Joe wasn’t doing the circus shots, but he was 7-12 from the 3-point line had an old-fashioned 2-pointer for his 23 points.
“It was good to see him, even defensively,” Anderson said. “He’s learning. Just like our team, it’s amazing. It was good to see him step up in big moments.”
Now they’ve got to build a winning streak.
It won’t be easy.
They get back on the court Saturday on the road at Texas Tech, coached by former Arkansas-Little Rock boss Chris Beard.
Oh, the Red Raiders are ranked either 13th or 14th in the country, depending on your poll of choice.
As we said, it won’t be easy but it’s the type game Anderson’s teams in the past have been known to surprise folks.
