Rob Chubb sank the first bucket of the night at the Auburn Arena on Saturday in his team’s SEC opener against LSU.

But Tony Barbee’s squad wouldn’t see the basket for another 10 minutes, and it wound up scoring just 6 points in the entire first half of its 62-55 loss to LSU – the second lowest point total in an opening period of an NCAA contest since the shot clock was installed in 1986.

The Tigers went on an 18-5 run to open the second period and Earnest Ross’ 21 points all came in the final 20 minutes, but it simply wasn’t enough to defeat an SEC foe.

“I told the guys that I’m proud of them for the comeback and the way they fought,” Barbee said. “But it really was irrelevant, because when you dig yourself that big of a hole, you spend so much energy trying to come back that it’s always going to be hard getting over the hump and that’s what happened to us.”

Junior forward Garrett Green led LSU, coming off the bench with 18 points and five rebounds. Freshman Matt Derenbecker added 15 points and grabbed eight boards in his first career start for LSU.

Auburn forward Kenny Gabriel helped out Ross with the attempted comeback, finishing the night with 17 points and seven rebounds.

Gabriel’s disappointed, though, that Auburn’s first conference game had to go down this way.

“With this being some of the freshmen’s first SEC game, and with them being put in a situation like that mentally, they didn’t know how to hand it,” Gabriel said. “But they just kept telling us we had to fight back and we can’t let this affect how we play. We can’t let this happen in front of our home crowd.”

Although Auburn dropped 49 points on LSU in the second half with the help of Ross’ hot hand, Barbee wasn’t pleased with his team’s lack of energy early on.

“I told the guys, ‘If you shot well like Earnest did tonight, don’t think you played well.’” Barbee said. “It’s easy to make shots when it doesn’t matter. It’s hard to make shots when the game’s on the line, when it’s 0-0 and every shot you take matters.”

LSU head coach Trent Johnson, on the other hand, was happy his squad was able to get back on track after dropping four of its last five.

“We’ve been there before,” Johnson said. “We’ve came up short where we had to sustain and play two good halves. We got off to a good start in the second half. I think we scored the first five points, and they were relaxed and thought this was going to be easy, and that’s just human nature.”

Junior guard Frankie Sullivan sat on the end seat of Auburn’s bench for the entire game with a swollen knee. After missing the first nine games of the season with a torn ACL, he returned for four games but was unable to go against LSU.

“His knee has been really bothering him, and you can see his production has kind of gone down in the four games that he’s been back,” Barbee said. “It was way down at Florida State because he has a lot of pain in that knee and it’s swelling. He tried to warm it up tonight and he couldn’t tolerate it and just couldn’t go. It takes a guy off the floor who really knows how to play.”

Barbee added that Sullivan still has the option to receive a medical redshirt if he doesn’t return this season.

For the rest of the Tigers, with a contest looming at No. 11 Kentucky on Tuesday night, now’s not the time for them to fall apart.

“Everybody’s got to stay together mentally,” Gabriel said. “This isn’t the time for everybody to break apart from this game because we’ve got that other one coming right back up.

When it’s a time like this, you’ve got to stay together.”

Gabriel and Ross said they’ll be devoting plenty of time to studying film from the first half of the loss to ensure they come out with more energy the rest of the season.

“As a team, we have to come out with fire like we did in the second half at the beginning of the game so we won’t dig deficits like that and get stuck with getting down by 26, 28 points and trying to fight back like that,” Ross said.

“We can’t ever let that happen again.”
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