RENO, Nev. – Three thoughts on San Diego State’s 69-50 win at Nevada on Saturday night:

1. Locked in

The challenge for Magoon Gwath was never size or talent or potential.

It’s youth. It’s inexperience. It’s repetition. It’s comfort. It’s focus. It’s concentration.

It’s consistency.

“I just tried to stay concentrated longer and play a little harder, that’s it,” the 7-foot redshirt freshman said, explaining his 15-point, 13-rebound, two-block performance. “It’s difficult. You do it every day and you think, ‘Oh, it’s just another practice.’ I’ve been trying to stay locked in for as long as I can, and I was coming off one of my best practices where I stayed locked in pretty much the whole time.

“A good result came out of it.”

You could see it coming.

He went from two points, two rebounds and five fouls in the loss to UNLV to nine points, seven rebounds, two blocks and only two fouls against Air Force three days later. Progress.

“Against UNLV, he fouled out in 11 minutes,” coach Brian Dutcher said Wednesday night after rewarding Gwath with crunch-time minutes at Air Force. “That’s tough. You’ve got to play more than 11 minutes. But two of them were on drives, where we told him the guy he’s guarding is a driver. You have to close out short, but he got off his feet and he closed too tight and they went around him.

“Those are all lessons learned. The only way you learn them is by experiencing them. But he’s getting better.”

Against Nevada, it came together much like it did in the conference opener at Fresno State back on Dec. 4, when he had 25 points, 10 rebounds and four blocks in a 22-point win.

Next game: zero points, one rebound against USD.

Next game: 10 points on 2 of 3 shooting behind the arc against Cal Baptist.

Next eight games: 0 of 8 on 3s.

Saturday was his second career double-double. He didn’t miss a shot (7 of 7), including his first made 3 since Dec. 11. The Aztecs won by 19.

Not a coincidence.

“He’s playing harder, longer,” Dutcher said. “It’s mostly at the defensive end. At 7-foot, guarding perimeter guys, he can’t rest for a second, he can’t stand up, he can’t lose his man. He has to do all those things right, all the time.

“And it’s obviously easier when you go 7 for 7. You feel good about yourself. For him it’s, can he do it when he’s 2 for 6? Can he still play defense? Can he still play with that energy and concentration? I think he can. I think he’s inching in that direction.”

2. Work to do

Dutcher was clearly relieved that his young team followed some of its worst performances of the season with one of its best.

Content? No.

Blinded by the glow of a 19-point win at a place where the Aztecs had lost two straight and five of the last seven were three trends that Dutcher is desperately trying to reverse and so far hasn’t.

“We’re not that coaching staff where when we lose, everything we did was wrong,” Dutcher said. “And we’re not that coaching staff where if we win, everything we did was right. So, as much as it feels good to win by 19, we won’t dismiss any of the things we didn’t do well, and I told them that in the locker room. They have to be held to the same high standard, in winning or losing.

“We have work to do.”

For the third straight game (and 12th time this season), the Aztecs attempted fewer free throws than their opponent. Nevada had a 22-8 edge Saturday and scored nine more points from the line. Over the last three games alone, the free-throw disparity has bulged to 42 attempts and 33 makes.

The rebounding issues that have plagued them on and off all season? Not solved. The Aztecs surrendered 18 offensive boards Saturday, a staggering 15 in the second half.

And Miles Byrd and Nick Boyd, the only players averaging in double figures and accounting for nearly 40% of the offense, continued their dual slumps. They are shooting a combined 34.7% overall and 28.3% on 3s in Mountain West games, just 23.2% and 12.5% (3 of 24) in the last two.

“We have to have them step up,” Dutcher said. “If they’re going to take the most shots, they have to make more. I think they’re capable of it. It’s just seeing one go in and getting your confidence back rolling, and knowing what a good shot is and what a bad shot is. They have to take better shots, know where their shots are coming from.

“You can’t shoot your way out of a slump. You’ve got to grind, shoot in practice, shoot on your own, then knock down that first one and then all of a sudden, the rim looks bigger.”

3. Alpha dog

For the second straight year, Nevada ranks in the top 10 nationally in Division I experience.

Last season, the Wolf Pack went 26-8, finished second in the Mountain West, had a Kenpom of 40 and reached the NCAA Tournament.

This season: 11-9, seventh in the Mountain West, an 85 Kenpom and slim, if any, chances of making the NCAA Tournament.

Coach Steve Alford took 30 minutes before meeting the media after the latest disastrous loss and didn’t make his players available. He talked openly about the frustrations following a promising 6-1 start, how he and his staff are searching for answers, how they lack leadership and toughness and maturity despite an average of 3.1 years of Division I experience.

The coaching staff is the same. The culture is the same. The results are not.

The mantra in college basketball, embodied for so many years by SDSU, was to get old and stay old. But times have changed, and that is no longer a guarantee of success in the strange, new era of essentially unlimited player movement. Experience no longer automatically means continuity.

“We’ve got some vets who have been with us,” Alford said, “but we’ve got six transfers who have not been a part of it — and Kobe (Sanders) didn’t get here until August because of schooling at Cal Poly, so he missed all of summer. Then you have two months to get them ready for the season.

“This is not an excuse. I’m just answering a question, because everybody is dealing with the transfer portal. But it is much, much more difficult blending those guys and them experiencing it, and they’re really not as mature as their age would indicate.”

In a later interview with Nevada Sports Net, he expanded on the phenomenon, comparing it to his days coaching at Missouri State and their reliance on junior college transfers.

“The portal is very similar to that,” Alford said. “You’re getting guys who are older, like junior college kids, but they don’t have that experience of winning or that culture of winning, or it’s trying to blend in a very quick time. We’re adapting as best as we can, but we thought we’d be a much more mature, tougher team with the age that we have.”

It’s not that transfers can’t adapt. It’s that you just don’t know, especially if they didn’t win at their previous stop. Sometimes the chemistry experiment works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Take Sanders, the Christian High School alum who is averaging 14.5 points and is a candidate for Mountain West Newcomer of the Year. The 6-foot-9 point guard didn’t come from a winning culture, losing his last 38 regular-season Big West games at Cal Poly.

Alford made an interesting comment, unsolicited, about Boyd, SDSU’s transfer point guard who came from a Florida Atlantic program that reached the 2023 Final Four.

“We’re missing some things,” Alford said. “We need leadership on the court. We need an Alpha Dog, when things do get nasty. I love how Boyd was for them. Any time it got controversial, he was the alpha dog on that team who made it happen for them. We have to figure that out and who that might be.”