(David Gray/Auburn Tigers)
AUBURN — It’s hard, if not impossible, for a head coach to be satisfied in the preseason.
For months, a team has only gone up against itself in practice. In a two-way sport like basketball, great success on one end of the floor comes at the detriment of the other.
Bruce Pearl knows that as well as anyone, and he’s spent the last several weeks trying to balance out what he’s seeing from his Auburn team in practice — all in his trademark cadence of blunt honesty and a little self-deprecation.
“I think the offense is behind the defense,” Pearl said recently. “I think that we’re either really good defensively or we’re really bad offensively, and I couldn’t even tell you which one it is right now. I don’t want to give our defense all that much credit.”
When Pearl takes a more positive slant, he constantly points out that his Tigers are “hard to score on in practice.” Very little comes easy on the floor for Auburn on offense, whether it’s grinding away in the practice gym or fully rehearsing for the season on the main floor at Neville Arena.
Last week at SEC Basketball Media Days in Mountain Brook, Pearl’s best player sounded a lot like his head coach.
All-American center Johni Broome is entering his third and final season on the Plains. He’s already been through two full offseasons with the Tigers, and he knows what it means when things are difficult on offense.
“In practice, it’s very hard to score,” Broome said last Tuesday. “We go 5-on-5, and it’s a lot of low scoring. I try to tell some of the new guys, ‘It’s OK, this is what it’s supposed to be.’ Because once we play other teams, it’ll be a lot easier.”
Auburn will finally get to play other teams in six days, when it unofficially opens its 2024-25 season with a charity exhibition at Furman on Sunday. A week from Friday, Auburn will host Florida Atlantic in a home preseason matchup.
Instead of continuing to beat up on each other, the Tigers will get to measure up against someone new for a change.
“The whole summer and fall, we know each other’s games,” Broome said. “We know their go-to moves, their go-to shots. We know the plays they’re running.
“It’s hard to score in practice, but I think that’s what builds our foundation on defense once we get into the season.”
There’s no denying that Auburn basketball has built, adapted and maintained a foundation of elite defense under Pearl.
And that, statistically, is what it takes to hang a banner as a champion in what has turned into the toughest conference in college basketball.
