The next few days are pretty big for Justin Minaya.

Minaya, who spent the last few weeks sidelined waiting to get back to action, got his first taste back playing Saturday against Vanderbilt, and now has a few days to get his feet back under him as the Gamecocks get ready for the SEC Tournament.

The Gamecocks will practice three times and shoot around once before their opener against either Arkansas or Vanderbilt, which gives Minaya a chance to get reacquainted with college basketball.

“I don’t think I’ll put him in the starting lineup,” Frank Martin said, “but hopefully we can get him a good workout today and two full-go practices the next few days to get him back to conditioning, timing, personality and re-engaged a little better the things we’re doing."

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The Gamecocks practiced in Columbia Monday and Tuesday, before hitting the road for Nashville to practice Wednesday at Bridgestone Arena. They’ll shoot around Thursday morning before the game Thursday night.

This plan obviously gives Minaya a chance to practice some more, up from just the one he got before being cleared medically to play in the Vanderbilt loss, and also gives the Gamecocks more opportunities to tweak the playing style back to what it was before Minaya’s injury.

“There were things we’re doing with him out there we stopped doing without him out there. I’m not going to run the same actions or ideas when you have players with different talents,” Martin said. “We have to reintroduce things we’re trying to do with him out there. It’s great to have him back. He brings an energy, an enthusiasm, a personality and a toughness at the rim.”

And whatever the Gamecocks design for him, they’ll need it.

Minaya is arguably the team’s most versatile player, plugging and playing at almost every position a coach wants to play him at, and is probably the team’s best defender.

He’s third on the team in defensive rating and second in block rate, and will likely boost a Gamecock defense in the middle of some serious struggles the last three weeks.

“There were times I felt we were running out of steam because we’re young and have to play with a certain level of intensity and toughness and desperation to be good, but I thought we defended really well against Mississippi State,” Martin said. “I thought that was a physical game and I thought we answered the bell. We obviously couldn’t sustain it.”

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The last six games of the regular season, the Gamecocks are allowing 83.2 points per game with teams having an effective field goal percentage of 42 percent.

After allowing just over 90 points per 100 possessions to start the season, they allowed 107.5 points per 100 to end the season with a well above average 19.45 turnover rate.

The most eye-popping statistic is an opponent free throw rate of 64.9 over the last six games, which means the Gamecocks are fouling entirely too much.

“We just have to be more aggressive and I feel like at some points we’re able to not hand check as much. Recently we’ve gotten back to that,” Kotsar said. “We have to get back to how we were a few weeks ago.”