Mizzou Men’s Hoops Opens 115th Season Wednesday vs. Oral Roberts

Mizzou Basketball Game Notes

• Game Notes

STORYLINES

• Mizzou Men’s Basketball opens its 115th season on Wednesday, and its fourth under head coach Cuonzo Martin. The Tigers are 3-0 in the Martin era in season openers and seeking a sixth consecutive win to open a campaign.
• Mizzou is 92-22 (.807) in season-openers with victories in 25 of its last 27 such games. The Tigers have won 12 of their last 13 season openers. Mizzou has won its season-opening contests by 22.6 points per game during the Martin era.
• The Tigers are 8-1 all-time against Oral Roberts, and 22-1 all-time vs. Summit League opponents. Martin’s squad beat Oral Roberts two seasons ago, an 80-64 win on Dec. 7, 2018. Sharpshooter Mark Smith and juniors Torrence Watson and Xavier Pinson all combined for 37 points in that win.
• Coach Martin reached 50 wins at Mizzou with the Tigers’ 69-50 blowout victory over Alabama to finish the 2019-20 season. Entering his fourth season, has has 23 more wins than the previous coaching regime had in three full seasons.
• Martin brings back one of the most experienced rosters in all of college basketball. Mizzou welcomes back 88.13 percent of its scoring from a season ago, which ranks third among all Power 5 conference teams, trailing only Texas and UCLA. Mizzou returns more scoring than every single SEC, Big Ten, Big East and ACC team.
• The veteran roster features three players with 700+ career points (Dru Smith, Jeremiah Tilmon and Drew Buggs) and five with 500+ career points (Smith, Tilmon, Buggs, Xavier Pinson and Mark Smith). All in all the Tigers’ roster has amassed more than 4,800 career points heading into this season.
• Mizzou’s 12-man roster features nine players with at least junior eligibility standing and one of the remaining three players enters his third season on campus in Parker Braun, making Mizzou the oldest team in the SEC.
• With freshman center 7-foot-3 Jordan Wilmore joining the squad, Mizzou enters the season with an average height of 6-foot-6. That makes the Tigers the tallest team in the SEC in 2020-21 and the ninth tallest team nationally.
• The Tigers shot 78 percent at the foul line last season. That ranked ninth nationally, and set an all-time team single-season school record at the charity stripe. Mizzou returns seven players who shot 70 percent or better last season, including Dru Smith’s league-leading 89.9 percent clip.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR: THE POINT GUARD TRIO

• Mizzou will deploy a system led by three talented, veteran point guards this season in redshirt senior Dru Smith, redshirt senior Drew Buggs and junior Xavier Pinson.
• The three floor generals have racked up a combined 2,191 points, 897 steals and 277 steals during their career thus far and each bring their own unique skill set to the court to balance each other.

DRUUU

• Dru Smith was named Preseason Second-Team All-SEC by both the league’s coaches and the media.
• The redshirt senior point guard finished his first season as a Tiger in 2019-20 with 393 points, 131 boards, 121 assists and 64 steals. The last two SEC players to reach those marks in each category in the same campaign: Ben Simmons and John Wall. He became just the second SEC player since 1992 to average 12.7 points, 3.9 assists, 2.1 steals and 4.2 rebounds alongside Georgia’s Katu Davis in 1995-96.
• Dru is a dominant defensive player. He racked up 64 steals last season, which led the SEC, ranked 20th nationally and finished sixth all-time in a single-season at Mizzou. He became just the fifth Tiger in the last three decades with at least 60 steals and 110 dimes. Dru’s 2.1 steals per game clip currently ranks second all-time at Mizzou, trailing only Stefhon Hannah’s 2.2 thefts per game.
• Dru led Mizzou in scoring, assists, steals and free throw percentage last season. His 89.9 percent clip at the charity stripe ranked ninth nationally.
• In his 81-game career, Dru has only gone one game without recording an assist, (Dec. 3, 2016), giving him 73 consecutive games with a dime. He’s posted 43 multi-assist outings in the last 45 games.
• Dru is a career 87.6 percent free throw shooter. That ranks third nationally among active players and first among active SEC players.

BUGGS

• Drew Buggs begins his Mizzou career Wednesday night after three standout seasons at Hawaii, where he set the Rainbow Warriors’ all-time career assists record with 437 dimes.
• Buggs led the Big West in assists for two consecutive seasons in 2018-19 and 2019-20. The pass-first point guard has averaged a whopping 5.35 assists per game over the last two campaigns.
• After coming to Mizzou as a graduate transfer, Buggs enters his redshirt senior season with the 12th-most career assists among all active Division I players nationally.
• Buggs prides himself on being a vocal leader, and came to Mizzou largely because he wants to coach for a living after college, and thought there was no one better to learn from than Cuonzo Martin.

X

• An electric playmaker, Xavier Pinson enters his third season on campus after withdrawing his name from the NBA Draft pool at the end of the summer. The athletic guard averaged 11.1 points, 2.8 assists and 2.8 boards in 24 minutes as a sophomore.
• Pinson hopes to steamroll into his junior campaign after finishing his sophomore season on a historic nine-game stretch that saw him explode for 18.9 points, 5.2 rebounds and 3.7 assists per game and shoot 44.4 percent from the field and 84.1 percent from the free throw line.
• To close the season, he scored 170 points in nine outings, including four 20+ point outings, and at least 15 points in six of his final seven games. Pinson’s 170 points were the most in an nine-game stretch by a Tiger since 2014. Mizzou closed the season 6-3 when Pinson was the leading scorer.
• After scoring 28 points vs. No. 11 Auburn, his encore featured a career-high 32-point outburst vs. Ole Miss. The 32 points were the most by a Mizzou player since Jabari Brown in 2014. Only Brown and Pinson have reached that mark since 2010 and Pinson is the first under head coach Cuonzo Martin.