Exhibition games aren’t necessarily supposed to be pretty. They’re supposed to be useful.
And if a team can win by 14 points while finding a few things it needs to fix before the regular season starts, that’s not a bad way to spend a Tuesday night.
Ole Miss closed out its preseason schedule with a 92-78 victory over UAB, giving Chris Beard and his coaching staff plenty to like and plenty to address before the games start counting.
Which, as Beard explained afterward, was exactly the point.
“Lots of things were exposed tonight, good and bad, so I thought it was a real win for us,” Beard said after the game.
The good news starts with the offense.
Six Rebels finished in double figures, led by Budd Clark’s 18 points. Clark also dished out seven assists, while Patton Pinkins scored 15 points, Ben Henshall added 14 and Santiago Trouet contributed 12 points and nine rebounds.
More encouraging than the individual performances was how Ole Miss shared the basketball.
The Rebels recorded 22 assists on 32 made field goals while facing a UAB defense that regularly changed its looks, including a 1-3-1 zone that Beard admitted his team hadn’t practiced against much.
Rather than immediately providing all the answers from the sideline, Beard wanted to see his players figure some things out themselves.
“We kind of let the guys figure it out, get through some adversity, and I think for the most part, we passed the test,” Beard said.
That included finding ways to score from different areas of the court.
The Rebels knocked down six 3-pointers in the first half and finished with a commanding 38-14 advantage in points in the paint.
But the defensive side of the equation wasn’t nearly as encouraging, at least initially.
UAB scored 45 points in the first half, took a one-point lead into halftime and connected on 13 3-pointers throughout the game.
Some of those were simply good shots. Others were the result of defensive mistakes that Beard believes are preventable.
“We’re in the correct defensive positioning, but again, here’s discipline again,” Beard said. “We’ve got to have a high hand.”
That word, discipline, kept coming up throughout Beard’s postgame press conference.
Whether it was contesting perimeter shots, securing rebounds or consistently executing assignments, the message was essentially the same. Knowing what to do isn’t enough if players don’t do it every possession.
The encouraging part was how Ole Miss responded.
After allowing 45 first-half points, the Rebels held UAB to 33 in the second half and eventually pulled away. They also recovered from an early rebounding deficit to finish with a slight advantage on the glass.
That’s meaningful progress considering rebounding was a major issue in the exhibition loss to Alabama.
But Beard isn’t ready to declare that problem solved.
“I think we improved from Alabama to UAB in rebounding, but we still have a long ways to go to be competitive in the league we’re in,” Beard said.
And that’s probably the most important takeaway from Tuesday night.
Ole Miss has enough offensive options to make things interesting, and the improvement from one half to the next showed that this group can make adjustments.
But there’s still a difference between playing well in stretches and consistently executing for 40 minutes.
The Rebels have now experienced both sides of that equation in their two public exhibitions.
The next challenge is putting them together when the games actually count.
