San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
AZTECS CHAMPS, NCAAS NEXT
AZTECS WIN, STATE CASE FOR HIGHER SEED LINE
San Diego State coach Brian Dutcher climbed the blue and yellow ladder, was handed a pair of scissors and snipped the final piece of white net holding it to the orange rim. He smiled and triumphantly waved it — the net, not the scissors — at the empty seats in Thomas & Mack Center.
Then he looked down at his players gathered below him … and blindly fell backwards from 10 feet into their waiting arms.
“It’s called a ‘trust fall,’ ” Dutcher said. “You have to trust your team. I don’t know if I would have fallen backwards if we had lost the game. They might have let me hit the floor. But since we won, I thought it was a good opportunity to see if I could trust them or not. “I think I can.” Dutcher did two months ago, when his team lost a pair of games at Utah State and nearly lost star forward Matt Mitchell for the season to a knee injury. He didn’t blow up the rotation or throw out the playbook or scream at them in the locker room. He trusted that they’d get healthy, that they’d get their minds right, that they’d become the team he envisioned they always could be.
Fourteen consecutive wins later, they are Mountain West outright regularseason and tournament champions for the first time in 15 years after a 68-57 win Saturday afternoon against Utah State, which had become both their nemesis and their motivation.
That it came in the conference tournament final and on a CBS national telecast made it even sweeter, considering their dismal record in both. The Aztecs were 1-6 in their last seven trips to the Mountain West championship game and 1-4 when they were seeded first, as they were this year. They
were 3-10 in their last 13 games on big-boy CBS.
The celebration reflected the relief. They charged on the court at the buzzer. They hugged each other. They waved “2021 Champions” signs. They danced under purple and silver confetti. They stuck pieces of net over their ears. They dumped a bucket of cold liquid on Dutcher.
“Thank goodness it was ice water and not Gatorade,” Dutcher said.
“I told them I have to wear some of these shirts in Indy next week. I’m not going home. At least they threw ice water and I can salvage the shirts.”
That’s because teams in the NCAA Tournament fly directly to Indianapolis from their conference tournament sites. The plan is to leave this morning, arriving before the 3 p.m. PDT selection show on CBS in which they’ll learn their seed, opponent, date and venue in Indiana.
Their ranking and computer metrics scream 5 seed. Most projected brackets had them as a 7 or 8 seed entering the weekend, but one prominent bracketologist had them at 9, adding a layer of intrigue to the proceedings this afternoon.
But that wasn’t on their minds Saturday. Utah State was.
“I mean,” Jordan Schakel said, “we wanted them bad.”
“To get our redemption,” Matt Mitchell said.
“I don’t know if the coaches were that excited about playing them,” Dutcher said, “but the team was and they’re the ones who have to play.”
The Aggies (20-8) had swept the Aztecs in their regular-season meetings in January and the last two Mountain West Tournament finals, most notably the stinging 59-56 loss a year ago on Sam Merrill’s lastsecond dagger 3 from just west of the Hoover Dam.
This game had a spectacular lob dunk and a sweet left-handed jump hook over 7-footer Neemias Queta after a couple pumps and pivots, and the usual compliment of transition 3-pointers.
But if you really want to know how the 19th-ranked Aztecs (23-4) broke their nasty habit of losing in the conference tournament final, you had to roll the tape on less glamorous moments.
Like the sequence midway through the first half with them down one and Lamont Butler’s layup having just rolled off the rim. Butler dived on the floor between three Aggies for the ball and shoveled a pass to the perimeter, where Schakel missed a 3 … but Joshua Tomaic flew in for the offensive rebound and muscled in a basket inside.
They got a trophy and a strand of net afterward, and perhaps the selection committee rewards them with a better seed, but the real symbol of their success was on their bodies — floor burns, bruises, scraped elbows, cut lips.
Coaches call it “want-to.” “Usually the title game is a game of the trenches, and they got us,” said Utah State coach Craig Smith, whose team was outscored 40-26 in points in the paint. “Normally teams don’t get us there.
“It’s big-boy basketball when you get to this game, and they just had a little bit more than us.”
The Aggies got within six with three minutes to go and had the ball, but Trey Pulliam — maybe SDSU’S best player over the past month — picked Justin Bean at midcourt and glided in for a layup. He scored again on the next possession to make it 64-55 and seal it.
Mitchell led the Aztecs with 14 points and was named tournament MVP. Nathan Mensah played his best game in weeks at both ends of the floor, finishing with 10 points, eight rebounds and two blocks while largely keeping Queta (18 points, three turnovers) in check.
Pulliam had eight of his 10 timely points in the second half. Terrell Gomez also had 10, Schakel had nine and 10 different players scored in the kind of balanced attack that has defined them all season.
The other thing that defines them: defense. The Aggies shot just 37.3 percent, were 3 of 13 behind the arc and had 16 turnovers.
The tactics were largely the same as the first two games — take your chances guarding Queta in the post without a double team, play off ball screens in the middle of the floor on offense while Aggies defenders stayed glued to Aztecs shooters.
The personnel was different, though. Mitchell grotesquely hyperextended his knee in the second half of the Jan. 14 loss in which the Aztecs managed just 45 points and didn’t play two days later. Mensah suited up in both January games, but he’s a different player at 2,001 feet than he was at the 4,770 feet of Utah State’s Dee Glen Smith Spectrum, where he visibly suffered from altitude sickness.
“I felt better being at full strength,” Dutcher said. “To have those pieces was important, especially playing three games in three days. We needed every body we had. I thought both teams gutted it out through tired legs at times. Each one was waiting for the other to take a timeout, and I didn’t take one. I thought we had fresher legs and a deeper bench, so we wanted to keep the play going as long as we could.”
The ground and pound strategy worked. Fifty-four of SDSU’S 68 points came in the paint or on free throws.
The Aztecs opened the second half with six straight points, the last two coming on the thunderous dunk by Mensah off Pulliam’s lob. That pushed the margin to 10 and compelled a timeout from Utah State coach Craig Smith, the first to blink. They never got closer than six the rest of the way.
“This means everything,” Mitchell said. “I’m especially happy for the grad transfers who came here, Terrell (from CSUN) and Josh (from Maryland). They came here to win, to win games, to win championships, and that’s what we did.”