Someone had to win on Tuesday night in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center. LSU and Arkansas entered the game with identical records, 11-5 overall, but more importantly 0-and-3 in the SEC.
LSU didn’t shoot it well, just 40% from the field, but they were 26 of 28 from the free throw line, which helped them get their first SEC victory of 2025, a 78 to 74 win over the Razorbacks.
Cam Carter led all scorers with a season high 27 points and was 10-of-10 from the free throw line. In the postgame, Carter talked about attacking the rim.
“I feel like the past games we have been settling, when we are attack, it opens everything else up, we made some threes, made a lot of free throws and one this game because of it,” Carter said.
“I think it came down to the spacing,” said LSU Coach Matt McMahon. “I thought we screened a lot better to create some advantages for our players. We were concerned coming in. Arkansas is a top-5 shot blocking team in America. But the free throw line ended up being huge for us. We’ve shot it at a high percentage to start league play, we just haven’t gotten there enough. And to get there tonight 28 times at 93% is just fantastic for our team.”
Jordan Sears scoring 17 points was also a fantastic development for the Tigers. The 5th year senior from UT Martin had just 13 points in his last two games.
The Tigers also got a big game from six-foot-nine redshirt junior Daimon Collins. Collins had just seven points, but he had ten rebounds and four of LSU’s 11 blocked shots. The final play of the game was an emphatic rejection by Collins on a Arkansas player driving to the rim.
Collins game came against his old coach. First-year Arkansas coach John Calipari signed Collins out of high school at Kentucky.
LSU will need Collins to keep improving to have any shot at stringing some victories together. The Tigers’ next three games come against some of the top teams in the country, Texas A&M, Alabama and Auburn.
