Everything Lamont Paris said after South Carolina's loss to Florida

South Carolina men’s basketball coach Lamont Paris spoke with the 107.5 The Game after a 76-62 loss to the Florida Gators on Tuesday night.

Here is everything he had to say.

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Compared to the last meeting, compete level, compared to the last one that’s got to be more of a 100, it feels like, doesn’t it?

“There’s no comparing this one versus that one. Although early in the first game, and it watched it again today, through 13 minutes of play they had 20 points. In fact, that’s why we started the game with some of the same principles that we had in that game, because you have a game like that, you want to change it all. At the end of the day, our core bread-and-butter of what we were doing defensively was conceptually good.”

“But we competed, all the way through. I felt really good about that. I hate to use the word, ‘happy’, but I felt really good about that, and there’s some guys on our team that continue to grow, honestly. Some of these guys are just continuing to grow. Kobe, I feel very comfortable with what he’s going to do when he’s on the floor, which is always a great feeling. And some other guys, too, but he’s one specifically that’s been doing that.”

The one thing I had took note of was you had thought about ‘we lost by 47, we’ve got to shake it up, we’ve got to do something different, we’re going to think about doing some funky defenses,’ but you never had to. You never went to the zone because you battled them well enough in the man-to-man all night long.

“Yes, we did. And in fact, there was one point in the second half, one of the players mentioned it, one of the assistant coaches mentioned it, and I thought we were doing a really good job, honestly…you held these guys, it’s 76 on their home floor, they’re playing really well. I don’t know what they’ve averaged in their last five games, and that’s with 27 second-chance points that you give up, right? So when you’re talking about, and I don’t even know how many transition points it was, so if you subtract those two numbers, what they actually scored in their half-court offense against our guys, I thought the guys did a really good job, to be honest with you, that way.”

Well coach, I thought the defense was so much better. Last time, they had 32 fast break points. We held them to 12 tonight. And we were just so close, but you can see the improvement between Columbia and Gainesville.

“Yeah, and again, I don’t want to downplay this, is this is also a team that’s playing as well or certainly better than anybody in our league. As we’re winding the season down, they know what postseason play and advancement looks like. They have expectations, and so they’re not, on their court, certainly going to come out and be flat. There was no flatness to them, this was our guys playing. Our guys played and competed.”

You guys struggled to make shots that were really good looks, especially early, first half but first ten minutes, how frustrating was that that you were getting repeatedly the exact looks you want?

“Incredibly frustrating. What are you going to do? ‘You gotta make that.’ Are you going to say that to a guy? That doesn’t really work. He knows that, so you gotta keep them in the right frame of mind so that they get back on the other end and perform all the things that they’re supposed to have to do on the defensive end. But certainly it changes the outcome of what that half is. Just the way that it could look if you make some of those good looks. Right around the basket, some open threes, some really, really good looks that most times you’re going to finish that thing off.”

“So you take that, and then the turn of events at the half. It was a six-point game, and instead of getting a stop, bucket, stop, they go bucket, stop, bucket. And then so six turns to 10, a little bad taste going into halftime but the guys did a good job coming out.”

He’s been an enigma this year, but I thought Christ Essandoko showed up better for you tonight than we’ve seen him maybe since the Clemson game?

“Yeah, he had a good day at practice. I don’t know if there’s any correlation in 2026 between what you did yesterday at practice to what happens in the game, I know there is for me, but he had a really good day at practice yesterday, and so I told him that he was definitely going in the game today. I said ‘don’t be surprised,’ and so he did, he did some better things. He’s really improved in the area of coachability. I don’t want people to take that the wrong way, but it’s a real improvement in terms of overall maturity and the ability to process what coaching is being said, getting out of your defense mechanisms, listening to what is being said to you, and then trying to do that on the basketball court. He’s grown in that area, too.”

I totally agree. And what a job defending Chinyelu. He might be the toughest guy in the whole league, and we’ve got a lot of tough guys in this league, but I thought Christ did a good job on him, as well as Walker. We played him fairly well, he still had a double-double, but he’s a double-double machine anyway.

“Yeah, he’s going to wake up and have a double-double. The day he doesn’t, you call me the day he doesn’t have 10 rebounds. And because of where most of those rebounds are, there are eight points baked into 10 rebounds for him. And so if he makes a hook or anything like that, it is what it is. But I thought generally we did a pretty good job on him. Again, I have to really look at the rebounding and what was the root cause of some of that stuff. They’re really good at it, stats would say that through 20-some games, but just in terms of what we were doing in the half-court, really solid overall performance in the half-court defense.”

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