NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Bruce Pearl hates the expression "live by the 3, die by the 3."
"Whoever made that doesn't have a clue about basketball because you live pretty well off the 3 ball," the Auburn head coach said back in November.
This Auburn team has been a prime example of that this season. The Tigers have 24 wins. They're in the semifinals of the SEC tournament for only the fifth time since 2000. They're a lock to make the NCAA tournament. And after Friday's game, they now own the SEC single-season record for 3-pointers made by one team with 368 and counting. The previous mark was 361 set by Arkansas in 1995.
"Look, we set an SEC record, all time, for the most threes," Pearl said after the game. "We don't just make a lot of them. We shoot a good percentage. We work at them really hard."
"For us to break the SEC record for 3s is incredible," added sophomore Samir Doughty. "I think that's a great accomplishment for us. We shoot a lot of 3s. We make a lot of 3s. That's just how we play, and we're going to play like that for the rest of the season."
What was ironic was that Auburn set the record in a game that was more or less won at the free-throw line, not the 3-point line. The Tigers made 14 of 16 free throws in the second half to pull away from South Carolina. Point guard Jared Harper alone made 12 free throws in the final 20 minutes.
Auburn still lived just fine from long range, though, knocking down double-digit 3-pointers (13) for the 21st time this season – including 14 times in 20 games against SEC opponents. And it wasn't for a lack of trying either. Seventy-two percent of the team's shots from the field came from beyond the arc. It didn't matter that they missed 7 of their first 8 attempts. They were determined to keep shooting.
"That's us," senior guard Bryce Brown said. "Coach says, 'Be who you are.' And that's who we are. We're a 3-point shooting team that's going to get up and down the court, harass you on the defensive side, and we're going to make shots. If we're off in the first half, we're going to eventually come around."
Brown made a team-high five 3s on Friday and finished with 19 points. It was only fitting that the senior, the school's all-time 3-point leader, made the shot that broke the SEC record late in the first half. It also came one day after he set the Auburn single-season mark for triples made, which is now at 114.
The record set Friday, however, means more because it was a record by the whole team.
"It just goes back to our work ethic at the end of the day," Brown said. "We don't just come out here jacking up shots. We actually spend a lot of time in practice, individually, and we spend a lot of time with each other trying to see how each other shoots. I feel like that's paying off now."
As Auburn gears up for its semifinal matchup against Florida on Saturday and later making a run in the Big Dance, don't expect the strategy to change. The Tigers are going to keep living off the 3.
Greg Ostendorf is a Senior Writer for AuburnTigers.com. Follow him on Twitter: @greg_ostendorf