By Tom Weber siusalukis.com

CARBONDALE, Ill. — Southern Illinois (1-0) hosts Illinois-Springfield (1-2) in its regular-season home opener on Saturday at 7 p.m. at SIU Arena. The game is classified as an exhibition for the Division II Prairie Stars, who play at home on Friday evening against Robert Morris-Peoria.

Salukis head coach Barry Hinson holds a 12-0 career record against non-Division I opponents during 17 seasons as a collegiate head coach. He’s 4-0 while at SIU with an average margin of victory of 24 points — Benedictine-Springfield (+38), Missouri S&T (+22), Olivet Nazarene (+16) and Missouri Southern State (+21). Southern Illinois is 48-5 in home openers since SIU arena opened in 1964. Four of the losses have come in the last seven years — Northeastern in 2010, Ohio Dominican in 2011, Saint Louis in 2013 and Wright State in 2016.

Head coach Barry Hinson met with the media prior to Thursday’s practice.

Opening Statement
I don’t think Armon (Fletcher) is going to play. Armon hasn’t practiced this week. It looks like he is not going to play on Saturday. I have no intentions of playing him Saturday. I will tell you this as  precautionary measure, we will suit him up. Or at least, possibly at least have him on the books in case we get into foul trouble.

Is he worse than he was before the game at Winthrop? 
I thinks it’s going to be an ongoing situation with Armon. I can’t answer if it’s worse. It’s bad enough it’s where we’re going to have to hold him out of the game. I will say that. Yes, yes, I would say it’s worse than what it was going into Winthrop. I think that’s the best way to answer. So what we’re going to do is we’re just going to hold him out.

Do you have any updates on the other injuries? Maybe Austin Weiher?
Well, we played Austin (last Friday). How long did we play him — one minute at Winthrop. He came in the game twice for us. He has practiced. We expect him to be able to play. Well, shoot guys, he’s gotta play saturday night. So, he’ll be one of the eight guys that we suit up. So I expect him to play quite a bit on Saturday night. Thik (Bol) was actually just in the office and said that his rehab is is going well. We anticipate, my gut is, we try to have him back for our first game in Las Vegas. So, he would get to play two non-conference games before our opening game at Northern Iowa. As far as Marcus Bartley is concerned, Marcus will go to the doctor on Monday and have another eval looking at his hand. We’ll make a decision whether or not he can shoot that week, but hopefully we can have Marcus back, hopefully by San Jose State.

I know you haven’t seen (Amadou Fall) play in a game, a high school game,  AAU game etc. What gave you the incentive to sign him?
We saw him practice. I don’t want anybody to think we haven’t seen the kid play because that would be false. We’ve watched the kid, I’ve watched the kid play live. Coach (Brad) Autry watched him play live, Anthony Beane watched him play live twice, so we’ve seen the kid work out, and with each work out he continually got better. I just told Mike Reis and, guys, this is something that I’ve been around this game a long time. I can’t teach a kid to be 6’9 and have a 7’1 wingspan. And we just felt like this was a no-brainer. And I will say this, if we had not signed him early, there’s no way we would have gotten him late.

With the shortened roster, I thought maybe it would put some pressure on the defense at Winthrop, but you really stepped up to the plate. How happy are you about that?
I was. I was happy especially because they did what we challenged them to do at halftime. I thought it was really important that we came out of there and had a sense of urgency defensively because we did not in the first half and we gave up 41 points. My goodness, that’s a lot of points to give up in the first half, but at the same time, lot of jitters to work out, lot of first-time guys playing Division I basketball. If you would go into our locker room right now, you’d see what we’ve done with our team. We’ve taken the stats from the last five years of all the teams that have won a Missouri Valley championship, and/or played in the NCAA Tournament and we have established what is the standard for those five years. What was the standard, what it was defensively, what it was 3-point, field goal percentage defense, all the way through the offensive stats. We have a goal going into each game; this is what we want to accomplish, and at Winthrop, we did not do that in field goal percentage defense. We did it in steals, we didn’t do it in blocks, we did it in our field goal percentage, we did it in our 3-point field goal percentage, but we didn’t do it on the rebounds. Our offensive rebounds were down. We didn’t have enough assists. We had way too many turnovers. There’s a lot of room for us to make improvement, and consequently, I think we’ve made improvement this week at practice, but we’ll certainly see how much improvement come Saturday night.

We made them uncomfortable watching on the computer. They were clearly uncomfortable.
Yeah, we really did. Not in the first half; they were very comfortable in the first half. But the second half, we made them very uncomfortable. We changed something we did at halftime and it helped us. I was a little bull-headed, a little stubborn in the first a half. I wouldn’t change, and we did at halftime. I knew it was the right thing to do, but I just felt like we needed to guard Cooks in a certain manner and we changed how we guarded him in the second half and it helped us to turn it around.

This is me personally, I thought Aaron Cook had some bad turnovers. Are you thinking of starting (Eric) McGill?
No, I mean we’re going to play Eric as much as we…guys, everybody is going to play to the point Saturday night where they’re going to want to come out of the game. There will be times, like there was at Winthrop, where I told Eric McGill, “You can’t come out. I don’t have anybody right now. I don’t have anybody.” Aaron did not have bad turnovers until the end of the game. Just three really bad possessions, and it was kind of hard. Once again, it goes back to maturity, it goes back to experience, you have a 22 point lead, and you don’t understand or realize the importance of keeping a hold of the basketball. We didn’t do a good job and I didn’t do a good job. I should have put him in a different position and said, “we’re going to play the clock out and go for the last second shot and just make them foul us.” I just felt like we needed to continue to play at that time.

They’re a Division II Team. They have some guards that can score and they have a 6’10” guy who will play probably Saturday.
Hey guys let me tell you this, we have eight guys. You read about Division II teams beating Division I teams all year long. It happens all the time. This will be a tight game just because of what we have on our squad. I don’t want to lose this game; this is most important game we play all year long. Period. I went on the radio Friday after the game and I told our fans, we need all the help we can get. We need all the energy we can get. I don’t want to make light of this, but when you’ve got eight guys, you can’t fathom all the problems you could possibly have in a game: team gets hot, you get foul trouble, you get a sprained ankle, or injury, or whatever. We’ve got to be ready to play and our guys will be ready, I’m confident.

Any ideas who will start in Fletcher’s place?
We’ll start Tyler (Smithpeters). I anticipate we’ll start Tyler and that automatically makes us smaller, but Tyler’s a senior, he’s been in this arena before.

Actually, I thought he had a pretty good influence, he helped the team a lot just by being there.
I’ll tell you guys what, I think Tyler Smithpeters has matured in ways beyond measure. Tyler made plays on the floor at Winthrop that he has not made in the past three years: shot fakes, got guys up in the air but didn’t take bad shots, release the ball, make shots, passing. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again; he’s our best passer. He’s absolutely our best passer and he’s gotten better defensively. He’s actually guarding now and wants to guard, so I’m impressed. I’m expecting Tyler to have a good year.

I don’t remember that little fake at the 3-point line and going for the jumper. I don’t remember that from last year.
No, well matter of fact, what he would have done last year, he would have gone all the way to the basket and turned it over or got it blocked or whatever. He’s not doing it now. He’s still driving baseline and going out of bounds. He’s got one of those in him every game. We need to threaten removal of body parts or boogers or something if he does that. We need to do something. I don’t even know what I can say anymore legally, but that bone-headed move he makes on the baseline. I mean he dribbles out of bounds once a game; you just account for it. He must think that’s the way to Harrisburg. He must think the only way you can get to Harrisburg is the baseline.

In your experience, when you break a bone in your wrist does it take some time to get the feeling back and the shooting and the rhythm?
Yeah, we’re being overly optimistic about that we can bring him back. Tim Jankovich, that is very well documented as being one of my very best friends, and his son, Michael, had a broken wrist and he was out eight weeks. We’re not even to the third week, so we’re all being optimistic. It was a different bone than Michael had, but certainly we are being optimistic.

There wasn’t any ligament damage?
No.

The rerun on after this on Fox Sports Midwest is Edwardsville and Valpo, and you play both of those teams this year. Do you afford that luxury… I know it was a gameless night. I was wondering if you saw it?
I try to watch. I go home every night this time of year… I don’t watch basketball all the time because if I do, I get depressed. I’m that type of guy that I start saying, “We need to do this better, we need to do that better.” I watched the entire game last night and I watched a little bit of NBA basketball last night and of course I always watch the Jayhawks every time they play. I watched them the other night when they played Kentucky, but if there’s a Valley team on, this morning I watched Illinois State, what a good win for our league today beating South Carolina. What a great start for our league, guys, what a great start for our league, and I thought Valpo was extremely impressive last night. I tell you guys it was great, and I’ll answer this question right now. I pull for any Valley team to win non-conference. I want all those guys to win all their games. Unless they’re playing a friend or buddy of mine, I want our Valley teams to win every game.