San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
WHO GOES, MW WOES AND A STIFLING ZONE
DECISIONS COULD BE IMMINENT FOR SDSU
Basketball teams at the NCAA Tournament travel in three-bus caravans, leaving from the downtown Marriott hotel with a five-car police escort. They exit the hotel and turn right or left.
Right, they head north to Hinkle Fieldhouse.
Left, they head south to Indianapolis International Airport.
The bus caravan carrying San Diego State turned left Saturday morning. By afternoon, the Aztecs were back on campus, their season officially over.
The good news: They no longer have to get cotton swabs stuck up their nose every morning, no longer are confined to individual hotel rooms, no longer have to eat meals by themselves, no longer have to wear Big Brother contact tracing bracelets.
The bad news: They no longer have any more games.
Here are three thoughts on what transpired after their bus turned right 12 hours earlier and what it means now that they’ve turned left:
1. The (immediate) future
Coach Brian Dutcher had his five seniors on the floor together for the closing minutes. With 52 seconds left, he subbed them all out. One by one, they walked down the bench, hugging Dutcher, then the assistants, then their teammates.
Was it a farewell to the season, or a farewell to each other?
There is always a certain level of uncertainty in a sport where, Dutcher was saying just a day earlier, “You don’t build a roster for eight or 12 years, or even six
years. You have it for four years and sometimes you have it for one year in the case of having fifth-year transfers.”
There is even more uncertainty than usual this spring. A lot could happen, and a lot could happen quickly. Like, in a few days quickly. And the longer it lingers, the harder it is to recruit in the spring transfer market that is already churning — not knowing how many players you need, or who will be coaching them.
The coaches: You start with Dutcher, who is considered a top candidate for the vacancy at Minnesota, his alma mater. If it wasn’t a job that at least intrigued him, he wouldn’t have insisted on a clause in his SDSU contract that drops the buyout drop from $6.9 million to $1 million for the Golden Gophers only.
The interest, according to sources outside SDSU, is mutual, and Minnesota Athletic Director Mark Coyle is expected to reach out to Dutcher soon, if he hasn’t already.
It doesn’t mean Dutcher is gone, or that he’s the only person on Coyle’s list. Or that SDSU won’t entice him to stay with a revised contract worth more than the $930,000 he made this year. But until Dutcher says he’s definitively staying, speculation will persist.
It’s not just Dutcher, though. He has a veteran staff — Dave Velasquez, Chris Acker and Jay Morris — that is afforded more responsibility than most and just went 53-7 over the two seasons, which makes them attractive as head coaches at lower-level Division I programs or assistants at power conference programs. Don’t think they won’t get calls.
Dutcher, and Steve Fisher before him, have successfully replaced assistants who have moved on — Marvin Menzies, Tony Bland, Justin Hutson, Rod Palmer — but it can be disruptive to recruiting just when the transfer market is heating up.
The seniors: The NCAA has granted all athletes a blanket waiver for an extra year of eligibility, so technically teams could field the exact same roster in 2021-22 that they did in 2020-21. And some will.
SDSU just won’t be one of them. Matt Mitchell has made no mystery that he expects to turn pro. Jordan Schakel has said he’ll make a decision after the season, but he’s talked like a guy who’s not coming back and his emotional news conference after Friday’s game sounded like a goodbye.
Trey Pulliam seems the most likely to return, and his mother said recently that, while it’s not her decision, she’d like to see her son pursue a masters degree while under scholarship for another year. That’s a big plus, given how well he played over the final month of the season. He was probably SDSU’S best player Friday, with eight points (2 of 3 behind the arc), four rebounds, six assists, three steals and only one turnover.
Joshua Tomaic started only once, on Senior Day, and largely served as Nathan Mensah’s backup. As a Spanish citizen, he could play professionally in Europe and not count against a club’s foreign allotment, making him a valuable commodity as a mobile, versatile 6-foot-10 forward. But he’s privately told people he’s never had so much fun playing basketball and may be leaning toward a return.
That leaves Terrell Gomez, who came to SDSU for two reasons: to play in the NCAA Tournament and as a sort of finishing school for his game. He accomplished both, given his marked improvement on defense, and now must decide what’s next. Of the five seniors, he appears most on the fence.
The underclassmen: It’s a testament to SDSU’S program that players historically have not transferred out unless they were looking for more opportunity at a lower level. But that also was with the deterrent of having to sit out a season.
The NCAA has yet to formally change the Div. I transfer rule and grant free movement without waiting a year. That could come this spring. Even if it doesn’t, the NCAA has been handing out waivers to play immediately, as one national writer repeatedly tweets, “like seedless watermelon at a Fourth of July party.”
That could further deplete SDSU’S 2021-22 roster. If, say, four seniors and a couple underclassmen leave, the Aztecs would need to replace half the team. Its only high school signee, Demarshay Johnson Jr., is an athletic forward with big upside who is not expected to contribute next season.
So far, there are no whispers of any imminent departures. But this is college basketball, and the transfer portal is expected to set records this season. Stay tuned.
2. The Molehill West
Mitch Moss, the host of the “Follow the Money” betting radio show in Las Vegas, tweeted this Friday night after beatdowns of SDSU and Utah State:
“Mountain West U1.5 wins = the easiest bet I’ll make all tournament. I cannot recall the last time the conference actually went over their win total. Disaster yet again.”
Moss was referring to the over/under proposition bet on total Mountain West wins in the NCAA Tournament. It had to reach two to cash the over. It got zero. SDSU gave up an 18-0 run to close the first half and trailed by 27 against Syracuse. Utah State gave up a 24-4 run in the second half and lost 6553 against Texas Tech.
It’s a harsh reality: No one will mistake this for a power conference.
You could a decade ago, when one respected computer metric ranked it the No. 1 conference in Div. I. The Mountain West routinely got four and, in 2013, five teams into the tournament. In 2011, two reached the Sweet 16.
Since 2015, it’s been a bit more dismal: 2-8 overall in the first round and 1-7 against Power 5 teams, with the losses by an average of 13.6 points and none closer than nine points.
SDSU, the class of the conference, has been blown out in its last three tournament games against the ACC. One was against topseeded Duke. The others were against Syracuse and North Carolina State teams that went 9-7 in conference.
But the difference is those teams get their pick of recruits and typically choose the biggest, strongest, bounciest. Being “athletic” in the Mountain West is different from being “athletic” in the ACC or Big 12 or Big Ten.
Dutcher talked about how you can’t simulate the length and speed of Syracuse’s closeouts on 3s. Utah State coach Craig Smith said the same thing about Texas Tech’s defensive ferocity.
“They’re big, long, they’re athletic, … and they cover a lot of ground and they clearly just swarm you,” Smith said after his team had 22 turnovers and shot 4 of 19 behind the arc. “You talk about it and you prepare for it, but it’s another thing to do it. … One through 5 they are more athletic than us, they’re faster than us.”
3. The Big Trance
Jim Boeheim, the architect of Syracuse’s famed 2-3 zone insists it is built to take away the 3-point shot. So how come the Aztecs attempted 40, believed to be a school record?
That’s what makes it so confounding, so counterintuitive. The zone doesn’t actually prevent you from taking 3s. It prevents you from making them, or at least a reasonable percentage of them. Before a late surge of 3s after trailing by 27 points, the Aztecs were 4 of 32.
Nine times in the last 12 seasons, Syracuse has been ranked in the top 30 nationally in overall defensive efficiency, and in almost every one of them it also ranks near the bottom in preventing teams from launching 3s. This year, the Orange are 330th with 44.5 percent of opposing field goal attempts coming behind the arc.
In 2017-18, when their defense ranked fifth overall, they were 338th in that department.
The idea is to lull you into taking them, giving the illusion that you’re open when you’re really not because a springy 6-7 wing with a 7-2 wingspan is suddenly flying at you. It starts as a physical problem. Keep missing, and it becomes a mental one.
Now combine that with a cadre of Aztecs shooters with itchy trigger fingers. They hadn’t faced a zone in nearly two months, and opponents that played manto-man defense increasingly didn’t help off shooters in an effort to make someone other than Schakel and Gomez beat them.
Over the previous eight games, the Aztecs averaged 18 3-point attempts and three times were under 16. In the season’s first 19 games: 24.6.
Friday night: 20 in each half.
“I think when they missed a couple, they were thinking about their shots,” said Buddy Boeheim, the coach’s 6-6 son who plays on the top of the zone. “We did a really good job adjusting after the first five minutes, getting out on shooters. Our defense was great. We knew where to be. The (scouting report) was great. Our coaches did a great job telling us where to be and the plays they ran.
“We were really good. It’s not easy when you face this zone in particular for the first time.”