Bulldogs at Utah State basketball matchup has been circled for a while. Here’s why.
It was an eventful opening week for the Mountain West, with No. 6 Nevada and San Diego State getting blasted on the road at New Mexico and at Boise State, while Fresno State started conference play 2-0 for the first time since 2010-11 and at 11-3 is at the top of the standings with the Lobos, UNLV and the Broncos.
But with the Bulldogs in Logan, Utah, on Wednesday for a matchup against Utah State, the look at the week past in the Mountain West actually starts 53 weeks back and with why Deshon Taylor can’t wait to get back to the Dee Glen Smith Spectrum.
Aggies, 81-79 in overtime. That’s it … the start of it.
“That one stuck with me for the rest of the season last year,” Taylor said. “Every time I see them on the schedule now … yeah, that game stuck with me. I always think about it.”
The Bulldogs were up by 10 with 4:12 to go.
They were up by one at 69-68 with four seconds to go, and Taylor was at the line.
The guard at that point was hitting 85.1 percent of his foul shots and would finish at 83.3, but he missed the front end of a 1-and-1 and that was not the worst of it.
The Aggies pulled the rebound and as Koby McEwen was racing up the floor Taylor in chase mode inexplicably fouled around mid-court with 0.9 seconds to play. McEwen wasn’t trying to get a last-second shot up, just trying to get in position to do so when Taylor got him.
“Just not a smart play,” former coach Rodney Terry said. “You have to understand time and situation.”
Fresno State was fortunate McEwen hit only the first of his foul shots to tie the score, the game going into overtime.
The Bulldogs got up by as many as four but just as quickly was down as many as five.
“If I had made the free throws, the game would have been over,” Taylor said. “Then fouling the guy … we got to OT, but they had the momentum.”
Taylor led the Bulldogs with 24 points in that game, hitting 10 of 17 shots. He had four rebounds, two assists, two steals and no turnovers in 42 minutes on the floor.
But the final four seconds in regulation, not typical.
That loss, Taylor said, doesn’t add much to this matchup. But it wouldn’t be a bad thing for the Bulldogs to finally put it behind them.
“It’s not like they have the same team, the same players,” Taylor said. “They have a different team. I just have to go in there and play like I usually play and hopefully we come out with the W.“
This week in the Mountain West
Tuesday
▪ Air Force at Colorado State
▪ Wyoming at San Diego State
▪ UNLV at New Mexico
Wednesday
▪ Fresno State at Utah State
▪ San Jose State at No. 10 Nevada
Saturday
▪ Boise State at San Jose State
▪ San Diego State at Air Force
▪ New Mexico at Colorado State
▪ Utah State at Wyoming
▪ No. 10 Nevada at Fresno State
The Wolf Pack can’t shoot
Lose by 27 points as Nevada did at New Mexico, and clearly a lot did not go right.
But the Lobos might have further exposed a deficiency in the Wolf Pack, who dropped four spots to No. 10 in the Associated Press Top 25 after the loss.
Nevada hit only 4 of 22 shots from the 3-point line, working against a zone. That’s 18.2 percent, and the seventh time already the Wolf Pack have hit less than 30 percent from three.
Yet, the Pack is not shy about firing at it.
Nevada is tied for 8th of 11 in the conference in 3-point field goal percentage at 33.4 while third in the Mountain West in 3-point attempts at 24.7 per game.
The Wolf Pack might not shoot it well, but they do shoot it a lot.
Hut Won
What is up with San Diego State?
The Aztecs got drilled in their conference opener at Boise State 88-64 with the Broncos hitting 56.9 percent of their shots, the sixth time in 14 games they have allowed 80 or more points and the fifth time an opponent has hit at least 50 percent of its shots.
San Diego State is ranked 220th in the kenpom.com defensive efficiency ratings and counting backward the past five seasons they have been 30th, 28th, 4th, 5th and 7th.
But it’s worse than just that.
The 8-6 Aztecs have padded that stat, as bad as it is, with wins over Arkansas Pine Bluff, Texas Southern, Jackson State and Cal State Dominguez Hills, three teams that have had some trouble scoring the basketball and a Division II team.
Arkansas Pine Bluff started the week 327th in the nation in field-goal percentage, Texas Southern is 291st and Jackson State is 334th.
The easy answer: Fresno State coach Justin Hutson, who ran the Aztecs defense when an assistant there and brought assistant Tim Shelton along with him to Fresno State.
It surely is more complicated, but coaching is a big piece; former interim athletic director Steve Robertello, by the way, good at hiring coaches with what volleyball coach Jonathan Winder did in his first season and what Hutson is doing now.
At Fresno State, Hutson has a group with a lot of new pieces that did not play together much a year ago and has improved the Bulldogs’ defensive numbers in an 11-3 start.
They are ranked 47th in that same kenpom.com metric, down from 76th, 60th, 99th, 190th and 170th over the past five years.
Aztec add
San Diego State allowed 80 or more points in a game only five times in 177 games between the 2012-13 and 2016-17 seasons.
A lot of shots, a little return
Air Force forward Lavelle Scottie put up 20 shots Wednesday in a 65-58 loss to New Mexico … in the first half. Scottie was 7 of 20 and finished 10 of 27, scoring 20 points.
That’s only part of it, as one might imagine.
Before that game, Scottie had never attempted 20 shots in a full 40 minutes.
His season high for shot attempts was 13.
He was 10 of 25 from two and 0 of 2 on 3s, which means he missed more shots inside the 3-point line than he had attempted in any game this season.
With 20 shots at halftime, he had six more than all of his teammates combined and the Falcons had played nine-deep.
His first 13 shots to equal his season high came in the first 13:40 of the game, and he had subbed out for a total of 1:25 in there.
The last time Air Force had a player take more than 20 shots in a game was March 9, 2016 in a 108-102 loss to UNLV in triple overtime at the Mountain West Tournament. That was Jacob Van – he went 12 of 25 and scored 37 points.
There was not another player in the Mountain West to take 20 shots in a game during the opening weekend of conference play.
Layups
▪ The state of the Mountain West: Fresno State opened conference play as a 14.5-point favorite at San Jose State and a 16-point favorite at home against Colorado State.
In the Bulldogs’ first six seasons in the MW, they were favored to win by 14 or more just three times – minus-16 against Air Force in 2017-18, minus-14.5 against San Jose State in 2015-16 and minus-18 against San Jose State in 2014-15.
▪ UNLV is 2-0 in MW play for the first time since 2005-06.
▪ In the Rebels’ 68-56 victory over Wyoming, Joel Ntambwe was 11 of 17 in scoring 31 points and nine teammates that saw the floor were 11 of 40 in scoring 37.
▪ In wins at San Jose State and against Colorado State, Fresno State had 18-0 runs in the first half that pushed four-point leads to 22. Against the Spartans it was 29-25 with 6:33 to go, then 47-25. Against the Rams, it was 16-12 with 9:26 to go, then 34-12.
▪ The Bulldogs are the only MW team with a player ranked in the top five in the conference in points per 40 minutes (Braxton Huggins, first at 23.6), rebounds per 40 minutes (Nate Grimes, second at 23.1) and assists per 40 minutes (Noah Blackwell, tied fourth at 6.1).
▪ Utah State scored at just 0.618 points per possession in a 72-49 loss at Nevada to open conference play, the worst effort in the Mountain West since Air Force put up a 0.585 in a 51-38 loss at San Diego State on March 1, 2017.
This story was originally published January 8, 2019 at 12:45 PM.