Auburn’s double-center lineup was made for this moment

AUBURN — After losing to Yale in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, Auburn had to feel like this past summer took forever.

That was especially true for the Tigers’ two centers: All-American star Johni Broome and longtime reserve Dylan Cardwell.

When Broome and Cardwell both decided individually that they would come back to play their fifth and final seasons of college basketball at Auburn, Bruce Pearl immediately started working on a lineup that have the two play together instead of just staggering the center minutes.

It wasn’t working. The double-center look wasn’t getting results. The difficulties soon stretched from the summer into the fall. Right before the season started, it felt like the plug was going to have to be pulled on this great experiment.

“They wanted to play together so badly,” Pearl would later say. “And so I kept on, you know, in practice going, ‘Look, this is fine. We’ve got time, but here’s the plus/minus. We have to play faster. We have to play quicker.’”

Broome and Cardwell were committed to making it work. When the season started back on November 6 against Vermont, they were in the starting lineup together for the very first time. A few weeks later, when the two were sitting next to Pearl after winning the Maui Invitational, they had been +34 together in less than 34 minutes.

Like everything in basketball, some matchups were better for this look than others. Foul trouble in the frontcourt also affected how much they played together. But, in every game that has featured a healthy Broome, Auburn has started both halves with the two centers on the court together.

According to CBB Analytics, Auburn is +183 in nearly 384 minutes of basketball this season when Broome and Cardwell are playing at the same time. Their offensive rating of 130.8 is the best of any two-Tiger combination that has played at least 100 minutes together this season.

But, when Auburn was thrown into a win-or-go-home situation at the NCAA Tournament this past weekend in Lexington, the duo was lights-out on defense. In 25 minutes of action together against Alabama State and Creighton, they were +25. Their defensive rating was an absurd 66.9.

Broome and Cardwell played six minutes together in the second-half comeback against Creighton — and it could have been more, if it wasn’t for the latter big cramping up towards the end. The Bluejays scored a grand total of three points when the two centers were on the floor at the same time.

On a night when Auburn’s offense was largely defined by the playmaking and shotmaking of Tahaad Pettiford, Denver Jones and Chad Baker-Mazara, the bigs did the dirty work to help the Tigers get a long-awaited, Sweet 16-clinching victory.

Broome missed nine shots and only scored eight points, but he came through with a dozen rebounds. Cardwell took just three shots and had only four rebounds, but he was a team-best +24 in plus/minus in 21 minutes of action.

“I think that was everybody being bought into wanting to win,” Broome said. “Obviously, you have to contribute to be on the court. So, if that’s what we have to do to rebound the basketball while our guards are having great games… I came here to win. This season is about winning. I know my teammates got my back, and they know I have theirs.”

And it’s no coincidence that Auburn’s much-needed surge in defense came after Cardwell led the charge in calling out his teammates.

“Those boys got cussed out,” Cardwell said. “I had to cuss them out. I cussed them out (Friday) morning. … I wanted that to propel us into the next few weeks and allow us to get hot. We’ve been slacking, thinking we can show up to games and beat people. We’ve played some good teams, and some people that are hungrier than us.

“We have to make sure we’re the hungrier team, that’s when we’re at our best.”

Auburn’s frontcourt success — which included an 8-and-8 game off the bench from power forward Chaney Johnson — came against a Creighton team that had 7-foot-1 All-American Ryan Kalkbrenner and 6-foot-10 freshman phenom Jackson McAndrew on the floor together for the vast majority of the minutes.

And that success should come in handy in Atlanta during the Sweet 16, because Auburn’s double-center lineup is about to run into the most well-known pair of twin towers in college basketball this season.