Hard work has its rewards for MU’s Tiller
Senior guard has earned respect for tenaciousness.
BLUE-COLLAR BALLER J.T. Tiller's unmatched work ethic has transformed an unheralded recruit into one of the Big 12's Best Players.
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It was late on a cool September morning as J.T. Tiller gathered up his belongings and shuffled out of class into the bright sunshine.
Missouri’s J.T. Tiller smiles as he’s introduced before Friday’s exhibition game against Truman State. After playing a supporting role in his first three seasons at MU, Tiller will be in the spotlight as a senior.
He didn’t have much time to waste as he made his way across campus to Mizzou Arena. There was already a car waiting for him there, all set to drive him to a part of Columbia remote enough that he wondered if he was leaving city limits.
It turned out the destination was a dilapidated piece of blacktop on the city’s north side. Hanging above it was a rusted out basketball goal, and near the goal stood a pair of photographers setting up for what would be the first full-fledged shoot of Tiller’s life.
The 6-foot-3, 200-pound senior had changed into his Missouri basketball uniform — gold game jersey, matching shorts and high-topped shoes — on the way over. Somebody had forgotten to pack his athletic socks, but there was no time to double back for them.
Tiller climbed out of the car and soon went to work. For roughly the next 45 minutes, the photographers clicked away. They took portraits of him posing in the grass with a basketball between his legs and others of him leaning up against the support.
Finally, it was time to capture some action from above. More than once, he cocked the ball behind his head as he flew through the air and slammed it down through the cylinder, each time being careful not to pull too hard on the worn-out old rim.
J.T. Tiller was the Big 12’s co-defensive player of the year last season after wreaking havoc in MU’s pressure defense.
“It was kind of funny because I take the longest to ever get loose, and I had just got out there and then they asked me to just dunk and stuff,” said Tiller, recalling the experience several weeks later. “So that was kind of weird.”
A smile crept over his face as he thought back on the day.
“It was kind of exciting, though,” he said.
There have been plenty of other experiences that have left Tiller with similar feelings this fall, from a luncheon with MU Chancellor Brady Deaton to a trip to Kansas City to participate in the Big 12 Conference men’s basketball media day. They’re all part of Tiller’s life now as the unofficial face of Coach Mike Anderson’s program.
It’s a position for which Tiller — who enters his senior season as one of 50 players on the Wooden Award watch list — seems ideally suited. Not only is he the Tigers’ longest-tenured player, their leading returning scorer and the Big 12 Conference’s reigning co-defensive player of the year, but with the defense-first mind-set he brings and the all-out effort he exerts, he’s also the embodiment of everything Anderson wants his team to be.
It’s also a position hardly anyone, least of all Tiller, expected he’d have when he first committed to play at Missouri.
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It’s easy to forget now — after a season in which he led Missouri in steals and assists, was the team’s fourth-leading scorer and poured in a career-high 23 points in a Sweet 16 victory over Memphis — but Tiller actually came to Columbia as something of an afterthought.
He signed his letter of intent to play at Missouri in May 2006, barely a month into Anderson’s tenure as the school’s coach. At the time, Rivals.com listed the Marietta, Ga., product as the 136th-best prospect in the 2006 recruiting class. He was a starter on a Joseph Wheeler High School team that finished with a No. 23 national ranking in the USA Today Super 25 high school poll. But even with those credentials, Tiller still didn’t excite fans nearly as much as another recruit: high-scoring guard Keon Lawrence.
While Lawrence set scoring records in New Jersey, Tiller averaged 14.1 points, 6.4 rebounds, 6.3 assists and 2.8 steals as a senior. The fact that he originally signed to play for Anderson at Alabama-Birmingham, rather than pledge to a BCS conference program, added to the questions about his credentials.
Anderson never shared those concerns.
From the first moment he spotted Tiller playing in a showcase event with his summer-league team, the Atlanta Celtics, in Suwanee, Ga., during the summer before Tiller’s junior year, Anderson was impressed. It wasn’t a perfectly stroked jumper or an eye-popping dunk but rather his intensity level that got the coach’s attention.
“He was like a kamikaze guy, everywhere, diving on the floor,” Anderson said.
Tiller has always viewed those things as part of his job, no matter if he was playing on a high school team headlined by current Cleveland Cavaliers forward J.J. Hickson or a college team built around the frontcourt tandem of DeMarre Carroll and Leo Lyons.
It was no different on that talent-rich AAU squad, which featured guard Javaris Crittenton, now with the Washington Wizards.
“We had our scorers, we had everybody in different roles, and my role was to bring the energy on that team like I do on this team,” Tiller said. “I just wanted to get out of there with a win — play defense, scrap, do anything I had to do to help the team win.”
Anderson found himself drawn to that attitude again the next summer when he saw Tiller at another AAU event. The more he watched him, the more he had visions of Tiller developing into a player in the mold of his then-UAB point guard and defensive star, Squeaky Johnson.
“Squeaky was one of those guys that he could control the game without even scoring a point,” Anderson said. “I thought J.T. could be one of those guys, too.”
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Tiller knows all about Johnson.
The mere mention of his name by someone outside the Missouri program used to bring chuckles from members of the Tigers’ backcourt during Tiller’s freshman season. That’s how often MU players heard the 5-10 guard used as an example for them to emulate. Anderson and his assistants used to make them watch video footage of Johnson’s exploits as they tried to teach the intricacies of their up-tempo system.
“That was hard work or determination, right there, in the human form,” Tiller said. “Watching his old tapes from the UAB days showed us how hard we had to play to be successful.”
For Tiller, effort was always the easy part. He learned the value of hard work from his mother, Faye, and father, Clarence, who spent 20 years in the United State Navy before retiring in 1998.
If anything, Tiller, blessed with exceptional speed and a physique that would make some strong safeties jealous, exerted himself a bit too much his first two seasons as he tried to establish himself as the Tigers’ defensive stopper. He went full speed all the time trying to set traps, deflect passes or simply pressure the ball, and his aggression often led to fouls and caused him to tire quickly.
With skilled guards Stefhon Hannah and Lawrence around to play the bulk of the minutes in the backcourt, Tiller got away with being a role player for short stretches. But the Tigers needed him to be more last season after Lawrence and his 11 points per game transferred to Seton Hall.
Not only was Anderson counting on Tiller logging more minutes for a team that featured four new guards — Delaware transfer Zaire Taylor and freshmen Kim English, Marcus Denmon and Miguel Paul — but he also needed him to become a more well-rounded player.
That process had already begun late in Tiller’s sophomore season after Hannah, the centerpiece of the Tigers’ attack during Anderson’s first season and a half on the bench, suffered a broken jaw during a now infamous fight outside the Athena Night Club on Jan. 27, 2008. In the aftermath of that incident, Anderson suspended five players and eventually dismissed Hannah from the team.
Tiller saw only five other scholarship players available when Missouri took the floor against Nebraska on Jan. 30. So a player who had always been content deferring to the Tigers’ other guards suddenly showed some assertiveness with the ball in his hands.
He took 15 shots that night against the Huskers and scored a career-high 14 points to help the Tigers stay close in a 66-62 loss. He followed it up with 20 points three days later as Missouri stunned Kansas State and went on to average 7.3 points over MU’s final 10 games.
“I got more confident with the more responsibility I got,” Tiller said. “When I found out that I was going to actually have to shoot the ball, that’s when I started really taking it seriously that I was going to have to get in the gym.”
He became an even more integral part of the attack last season. With the offense running primarily through senior forwards Carroll and Lyons, Tiller averaged only 8.4 points, but he developed into Missouri’s best playmaker, handing out a team-high 3.6 assists per game.
With the strength and quickness to get to the basket and a respectable mid-range jumper, Tiller also managed to put up some big scoring numbers when needed, including 15 points against Oklahoma State, another 15 against Kansas State and those 23 against Memphis to lead the Tigers, dressed in their gold jerseys, to one of the biggest victories in school history.
Of course, by ripping away a team-high 68 steals and routinely shutting down the opponent’s top perimeter scorer, Tiller would have had value if he never scored a point.
Never was that more apparent than in the team’s 62-60 victory over Kansas on Feb. 9. Tiller only finished with three points in that game, but he frustrated KU star Sherron Collins throughout and made three key plays in the final 90 seconds — hitting a go-ahead jumper, forcing a jump ball and dishing off to Taylor so that he could drive for the winning bucket.
“When you see things like that, you really see how bad he wants to win,” Taylor said. “Then you see everybody else wake up and you see how much he can impact a team by making everybody else play at the level he’s playing … or close to it, because nobody can play that hard.”
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Somebody had to be paying attention to Tiller during Missouri’s run last season, which included a school-record 31 victories, a Big 12 Tournament title and an appearance in the NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight. How else can someone explain Tiller’s place on the watch list for the Wooden Award, a prize nearly always bestowed on an elite offensive player?
“He’s on the Wooden Award list because he represents the kind of throw-back player, if you will, that sometimes is missing in college basketball today,” said ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla, who’s long been admirer of Tiller. “He’s the ultimate team player in a team sport.”
One thing’s for sure, his team will need him to score more this season with Carroll, Lyons and sharp-shooter Matt Lawrence — who combined to score nearly half the Tigers’ points — all playing professionally.
Nobody knows that better that Tiller.
“I tried to hide behind DeMarre and Leo and the other guys for so long, but you’ve got to step into those shoes,” Tiller joked. “I’m very excited actually, because in the past people would play off and they’d be like, ‘He’s not going to score. Just help off him.’ Now I’m one of those guys that you actually have to put on the board for the pregame to see how you’re going to stop him.”
To be more effective, Tiller, on track to graduate in May with a degree in business management, needs to get better going to his left and also improve his perimeter shooting. He only made 23.6 percent of his 3-point attempts last season.
Offseason surgery to repair a torn ligament in his right wrist might actually wind up helping him in both areas. The wrist had been bothering him since he landed hard on it in a game at Texas in early February and likely played a part in his poor shooting numbers. As he waited for it to heal over the summer, he had no choice but to do more with his left hand.
But no matter how much offense he provides, Tiller, like Johnson before him, will continue to make his biggest marks with his defense and intensity.
There may even come a day when Anderson is holding Tiller up as an example for future Tigers to follow.
“I think he embodies what we talk about,” Anderson said. “I’m really proud of what he’s done, and I think he’s going to take it to another level this year.”
Reach Steve Walentik at 573-815-1788 or e-mail swalentik@columbiatribune.com.
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