Fresno State bounced from MW Tournament with another close loss. Will it lose its star power?

Fresno State was bounced from the Mountain West Conference Tournament on Thursday with a 53-46 quarterfinal loss to San Diego State at the Thomas & Mack Center, another excruciatingly close loss for the Bulldogs, who had a lead for more than 22 minutes only to falter down the stretch.

Not long afterward, the attention turned to the Bulldogs’ 7-foot junior Orlando Robinson, who can return for another season of college basketball or decide to take an early entry into the 2022 NBA Draft.

The Bulldogs could still land a spot in the NIT or the CBI, extending a 19-13 season that included six losses in Mountain West play by five points or fewer with three of those in overtime or double overtime.

But going forward if Robinson returns coach Justin Hutson and staff can build around him for next season, add a piece or two, get older for the first time since he inherited Deshon Taylor, Braxton Huggins and Sam Bittner in his first season with some junior college recruiting or through the transfer portal.

If Robinson leaves, Fresno State obviously is in a much different position.

“I haven’t made up my mind yet,” he said, after the game. “I’m taking it one step at a time, take what’s in front of me, play these last games with my team and when the time comes for me to make that decision I’m sure you’ll know.”

The NBA early entry eligibility deadline is April 24, and the deadline to withdraw from the draft is June 13.

Robinson again showed NBA upside and his importance to the No. 6-seeded Bulldogs in the quarterfinal loss to No. 3 San Diego State (21-7), which will play No. 2 Colorado State on Friday in the second of two semifinals.

No. 1 Boise State and No. 4 Wyoming will meet in the first semifinal.

Robinson scored a game-high 25 points with 11 rebounds and three assists and his usage rate was 46.6, a third game in a row it was 45.0 or higher.

In two regular-season matchups against the Aztecs and 6-10 senior Nathan Mensah, the defensive player of the year in the conference, Robinson had hit just 30.4% of his shots in averaging 13.0 points with 9.5 rebounds and 1.0 assists.

But he hit 10 of 20 shots on Thursday including all three of his attempts from the 3-point line.

“I’ll just say about Orlando, you know,how good he is when we’re celebrating the fact that he had 25 and 11, when you say we did a good job on him,” Aztecs’ coach Brian Dutcher said.

“That’s how dangerous he is. So he’s a wonderful player. The points he got, I thought we made it really hard on him to get. So that’s what we wanted to do, make it difficult.”

The threes all went down, including one with 1:44 to go that got the Bulldogs to within two and one with 19 seconds remaining that got them within three.

But those shots also pointed up a problem for the Bulldogs through the second half.

Fresno State scored 20 of its first 27 points in the paint, but had difficulty getting there in the second half. The Bulldogs hit just 4 of their final 19 shots, and just four of those shots came in the paint. The rest were jumpers and threes, which is not a strength of this team.

Hutson talked about moving the ball better, but the Bulldogs also were up against the top defense in the Mountain West and one of the best in the nation.

“It’s going to always be a little of both, to tell you the truth,” Hutson said. “You’ve got to move the ball against a good team like that. It’s a fine line. It’s like (Dutcher) just said, some of your players are going to have to be aggressive and make plays and it’s a thin line when I’m going to kick it out and move it and when am I going to take that hard shot and there were a lot of hard shots going on at both ends tonight.

“There weren’t a lot of easy looks going on at both ends. We’re just proud of our guys for keeping fighting, but the points in the paint, some of them came in transition, we had a couple of sets where we cut to the basket, but we knew that wasn’t going to be there all night long. You’re going to have to make some perimeter shots against them eventually.”

Bulldogs notes

Hutson on playing in the NIT or CBI: “I think it’ll be great for our guys. If you look at the Mountain West, you win with men and older teams. I think that team had nine seniors out there. Now, you can reload and hat’s off to them with going to get (Cal transfer) Matt Bradley and stuff. So you can definitely reload. We don’t have a senior. For those guys to go play in postseason, there’s a lot of positives that go into it if we can keep our core. We need at least seven, eight, nine guys coming back in today’s portal world and if they can get rewarded a little bit with postseason and say they did that, it would be great for them.” …

The double-double for Robinson was his 10th this season and 26th of his career. Over the past six games, he averaged 26.8 points and 8.8 rebounds. …

Guard Deon Stroud, who did not play in the first-round victory over San Jose State, got four minutes. He was 1 of 3, the make from the 3-point line. It was his first three since Jan. 25 in a victory over New Mexico. He had missed nine in a row and was just 9 of 53 (17%) there going into the game. The Bulldogs’ bench was outscored 22-4.

This story was originally published March 11, 2022 at 5:00 AM.