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SAN JOSE – Three thoughts on No. 23 San Diego State’s 71-50 win against Cal at the SAP Center on Saturday night:
Flights
If there’s a downside to an impressive win after an inconvenient travel odyssey, it’s that it may gloss over the real issue here:
SDSU is the only perennial top 25 program in the country — maybe top 50 or 75 — that doesn’t regularly charter. It looks and acts and wins like a high-major men’s basketball program, but high-major programs charter to every game and SDSU typically does only four legs per season, or the equivalent of two round trips, in the nation’s most demanding travel conference.
Instead, they’re flying Southwest amid the holiday travel crush during San Diego’s notorious fog season.
Twenty-four hours after they left campus, 12 players and four coaches finally got to San Jose by Saturday afternoon, too late for their early shootaround slot in the SAP Center, after two separate flight cancellations, a bus to Orange County, a night in a Newport Beach hotel and Ubers to Ontario’s airport.
The rest of the players and staff — and all their luggage except uniforms and sneakers — arrived by bus six minutes before tip-off Saturday night following a 7½-hour trip over the Tejon Pass, through the Central Valley and across the Pacheco Pass.
The Aztecs, with a mere 24 minutes to calibrate their shots in an unfamiliar hockey arena, predictably opened the game 2 of 18. They averted disaster with suffocating defense and a second-half scoring surge.
But the point is, it could have been one that, three months from now, meant the difference between making or missing the NCAA Tournament.
This is the kind of fire they’re playing with.
Part of the problem is that coach Brian Dutcher is a nice, frugal guy. Steve Fisher, his predecessor, fought for years for charters and finally got four legs per season. That number hasn’t been increased, outside of the rare extenuating circumstance, in close to a decade.
The SAP Center is a few miles from Santa Clara’s campus. The Broncos charter.
Tiny USF, just up the freeway, also charters.
Stanford charters.
Cal charters.
“I like to charter any way we can, but sometimes a commercial flight works out just as well,” Dutcher said Saturday night, noting that San Diego has a major airport with nonstop connections to most cities in the West. “I’m not looking to spend money just to spend money, either. The university spends a lot of money on us, and I’m grateful for all of it. I don’t want to waste money.”
But there’s a cumulative effect. You might overcome planes, trains and automobiles that night or that week, but maybe dead legs and fried minds cost you a game or two down the road.
Last season, the Aztecs endured an eight-hour, two-flight adventure returning from a January game at New Mexico. A week later, it took 10 hours and two flights to get home from Boise, Idaho.
A month later, they closed the regular season with three losses in five games, including one that prevented the first undefeated home record in Division I history. Win one or two of those, and maybe you’re a No. 3 seed instead of a 5 seed in the NCAA Tournament and not playing No. 1 UConn in the Sweet 16.
Fundamentals
Players probably thought they were in a time warp at practice two Fridays ago. The calendar said December. The drills felt like September.
After playing six games in 16 days, the Aztecs had 10 days before their next one, meaning they didn’t have to expend practice and film sessions preparing for an upcoming opponent. They could focus on themselves, and that meant a return to the basics.
Another focus was rebounding, an obvious fix-it after struggling on the boards all season. The result was a 10-rebound margin against a Cal team that was outrebounding opponents by an average of 7.3 per game.
“We made some progress rebounding the basketball,” Dutcher said, pausing. “And if you know Aztecs basketball, you know our defense is always there. Even though we got off to a bad offensive start, we stuck in the game with our defense.”
Dutcher said earlier this season that there was going to come a game when they leaned on their defense to keep them in it. This was that game, missing 19 of their first 24 shots yet still somehow leading by one because they held Cal without a basket for 9½ minutes.
Miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss.
And this was a Bears team that had been scoring well, riding a streak of scoring 80 or more points in six straight games for the first time in a half-century. Its adjusted offensive efficiency, or average points per possession, was above the national average of 1.067 in 10 of 11 games this season and topped 1.20 in five of them.
Saturday night: .75 points per possession, the lowest in two seasons under Cal coach Mark Madsen.
Its 25.5% shooting (14 of 55) was the fourth-worst performance by a Cal team in three decades.
There wasn’t any magical tweak. It was just fundamental, relentless, vintage Aztecs D that ground the Bears to a pulp, for the first time this season by a young team.
“San Diego State completely took us out of our offense,” is how Madsen opened the post-game news conference.
“San Diego State did a good job with physicality, taking us out of our spots,” he continued. “There were a lot of multiple effort plays to force our shooters to dribble the ball. We didn’t get a whole lot of catch-and-shoot open 3s. They played with tremendous physicality.
“Our strength this year, we haven’t had a very hard time scoring. But tonight we did.”
Fans
The idea behind the innovative two-game series was for SDSU and Cal to play in Southern and Northern California at venues about an hour from each campus. That way, the games would count as neutral courts, more advantageous in the computer metrics and less penal in case of a home loss.
You get your fans one year, we get our fans the next.
Except it didn’t work out that way. Aztecs fans, as you’d expect, filled 2,000-seat JSerra High’s Pavilion last year . And Saturday night, scarlet and black outnumbered blue and gold by about 70-30 at San Jose’s SAP Center, which is 47 miles from the Berkeley campus and 469 from SDSU.
“Our fans travel,” Dutcher likes to say. (One tweeted he had driven eight hours Saturday to get there.)
Don’t think the players didn’t notice.
Said Miles Byrd, who grew up in nearby Stockton: “We talk a lot about how we feel we’re a Northern California team as well, just because we have so many Northern California guys and such a support system up here. It felt like a home environment. After free throws, you’d hear the ‘Hooooo,’ that little thing that they do. That was cool.”
Added Nick Boyd, who is from New York: “In Vegas, the fans showed up and were lit. Out here, you heard the clap before the first bucket (that fans do at Viejas Arena). They come and support, and we appreciate them. It goes a long way. It motivates us, especially when we’re going through tough stretches like we were in the beginning of the game.”
Originally Published:
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