Johnny Jones Hits The Ground Running
by Scooter Hobbs
4/17/2012
BATON ROUGE — Living up to his old playing nickname — “The Bullet” — Johnny Jones hit the ground running so fast after being named LSU’s new basketball coach on Friday that he didn’t have time for a proper introduction until a Monday afternoon press conference. And that’s exactly how he expects his LSU teams to behave. “We are going to play a fast brand of basketball,” the DeRidder native said after being unveiled with a mandate to bring back the kind of excitement the program had when he was a player and later an assistant coach under legendary Dale Brown. “We will rebound the ball and go off to the races,” he explained, noting that his North Texas teams either led or were second in scoring in the Sun Belt Conference seven of the last eight years. “When (an opponent’s shot) happens to go in, we’re off to the races as well. We will get after it and it will be a style that my players enjoy playing (and) the fans will embrace because they enjoy watching it.”
