TU basketball travels to Hattiesburg, Miss.

The Tulane men’s basketball team will look to start turning its season around this Saturday when the Green Wave host the Southern Mississippi Golden Eagles at Fogelman Arena. Tulane has gone 1-5 in the past six games, dropping the team’s overall record to 6-12 (1-4 in Conference USA).

Some of the Green Wave’s recent struggles can be attributed to injury, as two members of the normal starting five have been sidelined since Jan. 9. Junior guard/forward Aaron Holmes is on the injured list with a cartilage tear and tendon subluxation in his right wrist, and senior point guard Chris Sims is out with a non-displaced fracture in his right ulna bone. Holmes had his cast removed earlier this week but will not have his injury reevaluated until after Saturday’s game. Sims’ fracture will likely keep him sidelined for a while, as a return-to-play date has not been set.

Tulane’s opponent, Southern Miss, enters Saturday’s game with an 11-8 record (1-4 Conference USA). Junior forward Gary Flowers leads the Golden Eagles. Flowers is 10th on the list of Conference USA’s top scorers at 14.7 points per game. Flowers ranks eighth in the conference in field goal percentage at 50.7 percent, sixth in rebounding with 8.0 boards per game, and fourth in blocked shots with 2.0 per game. Sophomore guard Maurice Bolden is second on the team with 11.3 points and 6.6 rebounds per game. Bolden also ranks third among Conference USA players in free throw percentage, shooting at an 82.4-percent clip. Sophomore guard Angelo Davis and junior guard R.L. Horton add 9.2 and 8.6 points per game, respectively, to round out the Golden Eagles’ offensive attack.

In order to counteract Southern Miss’s offensive weapons, Tulane will have to focus on three-point shooting and rebounding. The Golden Eagles lead Conference USA in three-point field goal defense, allowing their opponents to shoot only 29.1 percent from beyond the arc. When the Green Wave struggles from downtown it tends to have trouble winning games, and it has lost six of the seven contests in which it did not make more three-pointers than the opponent. That means sharp shooting junior guard Kris Richard must find his mark in order for Tulane to have a chance at winning without their top three-point threat, Kevin Sims. Southern Miss’s other major strength is defensive rebounding, in which they rank second in the conference. Tulane is 3-12 when out-rebounded, so head coach Dave Dickerson will need his starting big men—junior forward David Booker and senior forward Asim McQueen — to make sure they do the dirty work on the boards.

Tulane will also need to get stronger production from the point guard position. In the three games since Sims’ injury, his minutes have been distributed between freshman Jordan Callahan and sophomore Trent Rogers. Through those three games, Callahan is averaging 5.3 points and 1.3 assists per game, while Rogers is contributing 2.3 points and 2.7 assists. Even with their per-game statistics added together, the two young guards have barely been able to muster half as many points as Sims averaged before his injury. If either of them has a breakout game against Southern Miss, it could be the deciding factor in a Green Wave victory.