USC finishes with 14 wins in 1st year under Martin
Despite Wednesday’s early exit from the SEC tournament after South Carolina’s 70-59 loss at the hands of Mississippi State, men’s basketball coach Frank Martin said his team has made the proper strides toward success in the future.
“Everyone remembers your last time out,” Martin told reporters. “And unfortunately you get judged by that a whole lot, but we took a step forward.”
The loss to the Bulldogs came as a bit of a surprise, as USC beat the conference foes in its final home game of the season. That game was one of the more convincing wins of its SEC campaign.
Junior guard Bruce Ellington led the Gamecocks with 13 points in the SEC tournament games and was one of two USC players to go into double figures. But the team finished with a shooting percentage of 37.5 and a dismal 19.4-percent performance from beyond the arc.
“We just got to hopefully build on this,” Ellington said. “Learn from the mistakes that we made in this game and just continue to fight.”
The only other Gamecock to reach double figures was freshman forward Laimonas Chatkevicius, who registered 11 points. Freshman forward Brian Steele, who burst onto the scene for USC in the last few games of the regular season, led the team on the boards, gathering seven rebounds.
Brenton Williams, who had a historic, 38-point outing in South Carolina’s last meeting with MSU, was held to just six points in his team-high 30 minutes on the court.
“Just a lot of credit to Mississippi State,” Martin said. “As a fan of the game, it’s fun to watch ... That’s a credit to those kids and those coaches.”
The loss in USC’s final outing of the season left the Gamecocks with an overall record of 14-18 and a conference mark of 4-14. Both records are improvements from the season prior to Martin’s arrival, as the Gamecocks won four more games overall to go with twice as many SEC wins as last year’s campaign.
With one year under his belt, Martin has developed a feel for the climate of SEC basketball and is able to draw comparisons to his former conference, the Big 12.
“It’s pretty much the same,” Martin said. “Two leagues that are very underappreciated by the national public as far as the kind of basketball that it plays.”
In his five seasons at Kansas State, Martin compiled a 117-54 record, including four trips to the NCAA tournament, with his most successful season coming in the 2009–10 campaign that culminated in an Elite Eight bid.
Now that fans must wait until November for the next Gamecock basketball game, Martin emphasized focusing on what the team did right and the progress it made as a decidedly young squad.
“We had an opportunity to close out some games, and we didn’t do that as the season went on, but it’s OK,” Martin said. “The job is a long, hard one and I fully understand that, and we’re not ready to take any shortcuts because that doesn’t help you get anywhere.”