The 2010s: Mizzou’s all-decade team dominated by its most successful squad

The task is to build an all-decade team for Missouri, and you can pretty much stop in 2012 when assembling a starting lineup.

The 2011-12 Tigers put together one of the best (and most entertaining) seasons in program history. It’s one of the real bummers of this decade that we didn’t get to watch that team past the first round of the NCAA Tournament. That finish, obviously, is a smear on their résumé, but it should not be forgotten how fun it was to watch those Tigers. They made music on offense. Frank Haith was an early adopter of small ball, in part because of an injury to Laurence Bowers, and while Bowers would have provided value that season, his absence created a monster on the offensive end.

Bowers would come back to lead the Tigers the following season, earning himself a spot on this team. After one more year of Haith, the next three seasons of Kim Anderson were, well, momma always said if you didn’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Cuonzo Martin has at least built some rosters with players worthy of consideration to help fill out an all-decade bench.

The rules of this exercise are simple: Players from the 2010-11 season are the first to qualify, and the lineups must be able to play together. So let’s look back on this decade — the beginning and the end — and use this as an opportunity to toast the 2011-12 Tigers.

Starting five

Point guard: Phil Pressey. He was the perfect point guard for that group. He was terrific in space, and the Tigers had so much shooting that the floor was always spread, so he could probe and find the open man. He often did so with flare, which added to the entertainment value. For his career, Pressey averaged 13 points and 7.9 assists per game. He finished as the school’s all-time assist leader (580) in just three seasons. Had he returned for his senior year and duplicated his assist total of his junior season (240), he would have finished 66th on the NCAA’s all-time leaderboard.

Shooting guard: Marcus Denmon. The Kansas City, Mo., native is one of the best scorers to come through Columbia. Denmon could rise up and shoot it from just about anywhere on the floor. For a scorer who took a lot of jumpers, he was extremely efficient — shooting 40.7 percent from the 3, 52.6 percent inside the arc and 89.6 percent at the free-throw line in his final season. Denmon’s most memorable performance was in Mizzou’s last game against Kansas at Mizzou Arena in 2012, when he put the Tigers on his back and buried big shot after big shot on his way to 29 points in a 74-71 comeback win. He was a second-team All-American that season, and if we’re picking an MVP of the program for the decade, he’s the clear-cut winner.

Small forward: Kim English. He is listed at small forward for the purposes of building out this lineup, but it was his move to power forward as a senior that turned the offense from pretty good to a juggernaut. English had a semi-disappointing junior season, when he was inefficient and his scoring average dropped from 14 points per game to 10. When Bowers tore his ACL in early October 2011, Haith decided to go small and utilize the 6-foot-6 English as a stretch-4. Opposing power forwards had nightmares trying to guard him on the perimeter. English averaged 14.9 points per game and shot 45.9 percent from the 3, which put him back on the NBA’s radar. He was drafted 44th by the Detroit Pistons in 2012.

Power forward: Laurence Bowers. While Bowers getting hurt prompted English’s move to the 4, the Tigers might have been more equipped for a long NCAA run had he not been injured. Maybe he could have helped them deal with Norfolk State’s Kyle O’Quinn. Mizzou was better defensively in the years that bookended the 2011-12 season, when Bowers was a big part of the lineup. So it’s possible the offense would have taken a slight hit, but the Tigers would have been a more complete team. We’ll never know. What Bowers did do in his junior and senior seasons is deserving of making this team. He helped the program get back to the tournament when he returned for a fifth-year senior season, leading that team in scoring (14.1). The Tigers made the tournament all four years he was in school, and he was a major contributor on three of those teams.

Center: Ricardo Ratliffe. Everyone fit their role ideally in 2011-12, and Ratliffe was the final piece that made it work. Haith put him in the dunker spot, so when defenses extended out to the 3-point shooters and one guy would penetrate, he was the recipient of lots of dump-offs. Ratliffe had great hands and always went up quickly, so he was perfect in the dunker spot and as the screener in the pick-and-roll. He also was a master at getting in the right spot and carving out space with his body for offensive rebounds, ranking 12th nationally in 2011-12 in offensive rebounding rate. Combine his strengths with those guards around him, particularly Pressey, and it made Ratliffe a ridiculously efficient scorer. He shot an NCAA-best 69.3 percent in his final season, which is a Mizzou record.

The bench

Jordan Clarkson. He was there for the final season of the Haith era, in 2013-14, after transferring from Tulsa. It was a mediocre team that made the NIT, but hey, Clarkson put up numbers (17.5 points per game), and he’s been the best NBA player to come out of Mizzou this decade. That’s good enough to make the second unit.

Kassius Robertson. Robertson has been the best player of the Cuonzo Martin era. A lot of folks wrote the Tigers off once Michael Porter Jr. was lost on opening night of the 2017-18 season, but Robertson, a grad transfer from Canisius, slid into the starring role and led the Tigers to the NCAA Tournament, averaging 16.3 points and shooting 43 percent from deep.

Jabari Brown. A former five-star recruit who started his career at Oregon, Brown thrived in Haith’s guard-friendly offense. Haith’s final team at Mizzou was weak up front, but he had a talented perimeter group with Brown, Clarkson and Earnest Ross, one of the best players not to make the cut here. Brown had the best scoring season of the decade in 2013-14, averaging 19.9 points per game.

Jordan Barnett. Kim Anderson did develop a few players. The best of the bunch was Johnathan Williams, who played his best ball after transferring to Gonzaga, and Barnett, a transfer from Texas. Barnett didn’t have much help in his first season in Columbia, which was the last for Anderson, but when the talent was upgraded in Martin’s first year, he proved to be a valuable piece as a 3-and-D wing.

Jontay Porter. The story of the Porters was that Mizzou never got to see the best of them. Had Jontay played last season, he might have been one of the best bigs in college basketball. But he did enough as a freshman in SEC play — 11.5 points, 6.8 rebounds, 2.3 assists — to warrant a spot here, considering there hasn’t been a lot of great frontcourt play in the program this decade. If Jeremiah Tilmon lives up to expectations this season, he has a good shot at bumping Porter from this team and maybe even working his way into the all-decade starting lineup.

(Photo of Marcus Denmon: Jamie Squire/Getty Images)