7-foot-5 Mizzou basketball center Trent Burns capped off an impressive three-game stretch with a stellar performance against Tennessee. His emergence is vital, sudden and unexpected.
COLUMBIA — Missouri basketball beat a highly-touted Texas A&M team 86-85 Feb. 11. Shawn Phillisp Jr. piled in 12 points and eight rebounds, scoring the go-ahead dunk to put Missouri up with seconds remaining and logged the game-winning block seconds later.
The Tigers won that game largely due to Phillips’ stellar play. He was essential to their success.
They lost the very next game 85-68 to Texas, largely due to the fact that Phillips struggled and was played off the court, putting Missouri at a major size disadvantage.
Theoretically, 7-foot-5 backup center Trent Burns would have been the ideal solution to evening the odds, but head coach Dennis Gates turned toward 6-foot-9 Nicholas Randall instead — Burns wasn’t ready.
Gates needed to see improvement in a specific area before considering playing Burns or any other backup big for an extended period in an important setting.
“Consistency,” Gates said. “We have to be able to find the consistency throughout the game and throughout practices.”
The next two games — a win over Vanderbilt and a loss to Arkansas — saw Phillips begin to decline and Burns begin to emerge. Burns recorded a team-high plus-minus and played his most and second-most minutes in a game in both games.
His Tuesday night performance against Tennessee proved he wasn’t just a flash in the pan, rather potentially Missouri’s best big man.
He racked up four points and seven rebounds in a career-high 19 minutes, providing stability on both sides of the ball. The 7-foot-5 giant also logged a career-high four steals, one of which was a late-game stop on projected lottery pick Nate Ament.
Not only did Burns haul in his own rebounds, he prevented the Volunteer bigs from dominating on the glass — something Phillips couldn’t do. Phillips allowed three Volunteer offensive rebounds in his first 4:33 stint of the game, and eight of Tennessee’s 12 second-half offensive rebounds occurred in the 11 minutes he was on the floor.
“You all are seeing a kid grow up right before your eyes,” Missouri head coach Dennis Gates said. “Sometimes it takes offseasons, but when you see a kid, through a season, grow, it's glaring. It is special.”
While he didn’t start, he was Gates’ first substitution in both halves, checking in 4:33 into the first half and 2:04 into the second half.
That also means Phillips was the first Tiger to hit the bench in both halves.
The role-reversal became full-fledged on Tuesday night, but it felt much more like a Friday. A “Freaky Friday.”
“Freaky Friday,” released Aug. 6, 2003, was a movie starring Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis. The plot centers around the minds of Lohan and Curtis’ characters switching bodies. See where this is going?
Rather suddenly, Burns and Phillips’ level of play have swapped — Burns’ is now vital to the team’s success while Phillips has severely struggled.
The sudden switch comes as a surprise, given that Burns was a non-contributor at the time of Phillips’ standout game against Texas A&M, playing zero minutes in the contest and not playing double-digit minutes in 13 of his first 14 games.
But this wasn’t sudden for Burns. This culmination was two seasons worth of buildup to a stretch like this, where his potential begins to turn into production.
“I’m proud of Trent's patience,” Gates said. “I'm proud of his resolve. I'm proud of his toughness, and I'm proud of the production that he's been able to, in this long season, accomplish. Because some would have thrown in the towel by now and not been ready, and you have to have guys be prepared late in the game to sort of invigorate your team, and that's what Burns is doing for us.”
That invigoration Gates’ referenced and Burns’ provided is absolutely critical at this point in the season. Missouri is without a starting-caliber center if Philips’ play regresses — unless, of course, Burns continues his usurping play, which has shown no signs of slowing down.
Missouri needs to be firing on all cylinders as the regular season dwindles to both reach and succeed in the postseason. Burns, an afterthought just a dozen days ago, is now an important piece of that pie.
“You obviously want to play the best going into March,” team captain Mark Mitchell said. “We have different guys clicking, different guys playing the best basketball of the year. That's all you can really ask for.”
Missouri has three remaining games on its regular-season schedule, playing bottom-tier SEC teams Mississippi State and Oklahoma on the road before hosting a ranked Arkansas team to close the season. Burns and his teammates have to keep playing their best basketball.