First ports of call don’t come much tougher.
Missouri basketball faces Auburn on Saturday afternoon in Auburn, Alabama, to open its Southeastern Conference slate. That means Mizzou, playing its first SEC game since losing all 19 matchups it played against league opponents in the 2023-24 season, is traveling to face one of the top teams in the nation for its first shot at redemption.
Mizzou is 11-2 this season, which is already three more wins than it managed in its historically poor last campaign. So far this season, Missouri has high-major wins over Kansas and California, and its losses both were to teams currently ranked among the top 30 in the net: Illinois and Memphis.
Auburn, like the SEC as a whole, may be a different animal altogether.
Here’s what you need to know about Auburn before Mizzou heads down to the Plains to open up its SEC campaign:
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How will Missouri basketball handle All-American center Johni Broome?
In its first jaunt into SEC action, Missouri gets a player MU head coach Dennis Gates called “a potential player of the year.”
The 6-foot-10, 240-pound Johni Broome, cleared from a brief injury scare in mid-December, is averaging 18.2 points, 11.5 rebounds, 3.4 assists and 2.6 blocks per game through nonconference play. That certainly fits the bill of the preseason All-American, and a potential candidate for Naismith Men’s College Player of the Year honors.
Mizzou has faced an All-American center in Kansas’ Hunter Dickinson, and fared extremely well there as it matched him up with Josh Gray. But, Broome shapes up as perhaps an even bigger challenge for the 7-0 Mizzou big man out of Brooklyn.
Gates has previously called Gray an All-SEC defensive team-caliber player, and he’s going to need to show some of that Saturday.
“(Broome is) playing unselfish basketball. He could easily average 25-30 points per game, if he wanted to,” Gates said. “And I just think that speaks for the depth of the team, the level of unselfishness he has, but also the job Coach (Bruce) Pearl has done with his program.”
National title contenders?
Auburn has stacked elite wins through nonconference play. Pearl’s Tigers have only one loss: A road, six-point loss at Duke.
AU’s best wins? On the road at Houston, which is fifth in the NET rankings; on a neutral court over Iowa State, which is sixth in the NET; and double-digit point wins on neutral courts over North Carolina, Purdue, Memphis and Ohio State, all of which are top 50 in the net.
There appears to be almost no scenario where Auburn isn’t one of the top-seeded teams come March … and one of the frontrunners to win the whole thing.
What does Auburn do well?
This may not be what Missouri fans want to hear, but … just about everything.
The Tigers have the No. 1 adjusted offensive rating on the analytics site KenPom’s ratings. They have the No. 11 adjusted defensive rating, according to those rankings, too.
With the 14th-strongest schedule in the country to date, Auburn has averaged 88.3 points per game and held opponents to 64.8 points per game, which is an average margin of victory of 23.5 points.
AU has averaged 9.0 more rebounds per game than its opponents, 11.3 more assists per game, 4.7 more blocks per game and it has committed 2.5 less turnovers per game. Pearl’s Tigers average more than 10 triples per game.
Five players — Broome; Chad Baker-Mazara; Tahaad Pettiford; Denver Jones; and Chaney Johnson — are each averaging 10 or more points per game.
Seems pretty good, eh?
How can Mizzou hurt Auburn?
You likely could have guessed this, but Auburn doesn’t have many clear-and-obvious weaknesses.
So, Mizzou’s path to a competitive game on the road is far more about executing on its own strengths. That means running the offense at the rim with Mark Mitchell, Anthony Robinson II and Tamar Bates; taking the 3-point chances when they come through Caleb Grill, Trent Pierce and/or Marques Warrick; and getting a career-performance out of Gray guarding Broome in addition to some season-best defensive days across the court.
Missouri also may have to force Auburn into something it doesn’t do very often: Turning the ball over. MU is averaging 16 turnovers a game, the 25th-most in the country. Auburn turns the ball over just 8.8 times per contest, the second-least in the nation.
If Mizzou can pull the home team closer to its average, that bodes well but isn’t an absolutely necessity, per Gates. MU has to take care of itself, first.
“I think … they have a very deep team, and obviously one of the nation’s very best basketball players in Broome,” Gates said. … “Handling the environment is going to be key. We can’t allow home-court advantage to be played against us. We’ve got to understand the volume of that, and we’ve got to understand the execution. So, for us, when it comes down to turnovers — if they have minimal turnovers, I want to have minimal turnovers, too.”
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Score prediction: Auburn 91, Missouri 74
A 17-point win over a Missouri team that looks much-improved may seem a little harsh, but this type of scoreline has been just about the modus operandi for Auburn so far this season.
Mizzou could play a half-decent game and end up on the wrong end of a double-digit game. It’s just the caliber of opponent. If Auburn plays its best basketball, there aren’t many teams in the country that look capable of keeping up with those Tigers.
Mizzou absolutely needs its very best.
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Scouting report, score prediction for Missouri basketball at Auburn
