Steven Pearl’s Auburn team took it on the chin on Saturday night at No. 21 Arkansas while playing without leading scorer Keyshawn Hall, and the first-year Tigers head coach expounded on Hall’s absence during his postgame press conference with reporters.
It was during his pregame radio interview on Saturday when Pearl announced the bombshell news that his senior forward would be “out indefinitely” for disciplinary reasons.
“The length and the duration are up to him. … We’re hoping this isn’t something that has to drag out longer than it needs to,” Pearl said after announcing the action toward Hall.
Not surprisingly, in a road, primetime game against a ranked opponent, Pearl’s team suffered the consequences of not having its No. 1 offensive option. Auburn lost 88-75, seeing its losing streak extended to 4 games, as it fell to 14-11 overall and 5-7 in the SEC. Having Hall wouldn’t have guaranteed victory but surely would’ve helped matters, with Hall averaging 20.7 points per game in his first season on the Plains after transferring from UCF.
Hall has also played for George Mason and UNLV during his winding collegiate basketball journey, and his charmed first season at Auburn has now hit a roadblock with Pearl having to take the hard step of discipling his own star player.
“It’s going to be hard to win games when (Hall) is not out there,” Pearl admitted to reporters after the Tigers’ latest loss. “We’ve got to come together. We’ve got to limit our distractions off the floor. We’ve got to stop being put in positions where we have to make decisions to discipline guys. If we can do that and focus on basketball for a couple weeks, this team has shown they have the ability to win big games.”
Whether Hall is back on the court or not by then, Auburn will try to finally snap its skid on Wednesday night when it returns to the road to face Mississippi State in a 9 p.m. ET tipoff on ESPN2.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
