Flanigan familiar with foes’ scorers
Over three days at the Jack Stephens Center, the UALR Trojans will try to slow down Georgia State’s D’Marcus Simonds and Georgia Southern’s Tookie Brown.
If things had played out differently two years ago, University of ArkansasRock Coach Wes Flanigan could have been coaching them both.
Flanigan recruited both Simonds and Brown when he was an assistant at Mississippi State. He obtained pledges from both.
Brown, second in the Sun Belt at 18.1 points per game, signed with the Bulldogs but never made it to campus in Starkville, Miss., after Coach Rick Ray was fired at the end of the 2015 season. Simonds, a leading candidate for Sun Belt freshman of the year, was committed to the Bulldogs until Ray was fired, and he changed his pledge to Georgia State.
“Those are mid- to high-major guys,” Flanigan said. “Those are the types of guys that you have to get to be really good in this league. And they’ve done a great job for both teams.”
Flanigan didn’t have a chance to get either to UALR, which plays Georgia Southern at 7 p.m. tonight. Ray was fired in March, and Flanigan wasn’t hired by Chris Beard as an assistant until May. In between, Brown signed with Georgia Southern, not far from his Madison, Ga. home. Simonds committed to Georgia State, not far from his home in Gainesville, Ga.
Brown was the Sun Belt freshman of the year last season and a likely first-team all-Sun Belt pick this year. Simonds is averaging 16.3 points in Sun Belt games, tops among league freshmen.
“Those are good kids,” he said. “I know them really well. Great parents and support systems. They’re good players.”
Flanigan said the Trojans (13-14, 4-10) have an advantage considering he knows plenty about both players, but UALR has had problems defensively.
The Trojans are fourth in the Sun Belt in points allowed per game (69.2), but teams are shooting 45.1 percent from the floor and 37.0 percent from three-point range, which rank 10th and 11th, respectively. UALR has let a team shoot 45 percent or better in seven of the past eight games.
“It’s just a lack of focus,” senior guard Marcus Johnson Jr. said. “Sometimes we get lazy, and we would lose our man, and just minor things. It’s nothing that we can’t fix. But we’ve got to want to do it. And we’re getting better at that type of stuff.”
Flanigan in recent games has tried using a 3-2 zone defense, an idea brought up by assistant coach Kwanza Johnson. Flanigan said he decided to use it after realizing early in the season that his preferred pressure defense wasn’t effective. A 2-3 zone didn’t get the results he wanted, either.
“We’re making some strides,” he said. “The biggest thing is just guarding our yard. If we do a better job of guarding it initially, that’ll help us, and then finishing our possessions with defensive rebounds.”