CONTRASTING STYLES
ASU is up and down the court, while Aztecs will clamp down on defense
“I’ve played with him since middle school. I literally know the ins and outs of his game. … I have no blind spots with Remy’s game.”
SDSU’s Adam Seiko • On former teammate Remy Martin of ASU
The eighth-grade club basketball national championship in 2013 was in Orlando, Fla., with 88 teams. California Basketball Club from Chatsworth won all eight of its games to claim the title, just as it had the previous year. It beat the Thad War Eagles from Memphis, Tenn., in the final 65-38.
Point guard Remy Martin had 14 points. The leading scorer that day was another guard, Adam Seiko, with 17.
They meet for the first time in college tonight, when Martin’s No. 23-ranked Arizona State hosts Seiko’s No. 24 San Diego State at Desert Financial Arena. Teammates for eight years, friends forever, adversaries for 40 minutes.
They’ll probably guard each other.
“I’ve played with him since middle school,” said Seiko, who also played with Martin for four years at Sierra Canyon High in
Chatsworth. “I literally know the ins and outs of his game. … I’m very familiar with him. I have no blind spots with Remy’s game.”
Their teams are ranked one spot apart, the only two representatives from the Southwest in The Associated Press Top 25. The similarities end there, though, personified by the differences in the former California Basketball Club teammates.
Martin: one of the nation’s
premier point guards, a preseason All-American and Pac-12 player of the year, 62 career starts, 19.1 points and 4.1 assists last year, 10 career games of 24 or more points, high profile, high oc
tane, energetic, f lashy, noticeable.
Seiko: zero career starts, a career average of 2.5 points, a career high of nine against Division I opposition, defensive specialist, role player, glue guy, quiet, unassuming, under the radar.
Their Sierra Canyon teams were beyond loaded. Their senior year, the roster had eight future Div. I players, including two who would play at Duke (Marvin Bagley III and Cassius Stanley), two at Arizona State (Martin and Marcus Bagley) and one each at UCLA (Cody Riley) and SDSU (Seiko).
Martin’s ASU roster is assembled with the same formula, collecting as much talent as possible, putting it on the f loor together and hoping one basketball is enough.
Martin is averaging 17.3 points, and he’s not the leading scorer. Freshman forward Josh Christopher is at 17.5. He’s the Sun Devils’ first McDonald’s All-American since James Harden in 2007 after averaging 39.4 points for Mayfair High in Lakewood.
There’s also senior guard Alonzo Verge Jr., the Pac-12’s sixth man of the year last season after averaging 16.8 points off the bench.
And the younger Bagley, Marcus, who is the third-highestrated recruit in school history after Christopher and Harden. All four — Martin, Christopher, Verge and Bagley — are expected to be in the NBA Draft next year.
The bench is littered with fourstar recruits like St. Augustine High alum Taeshon Cherry and transfers like guard Holland Woods, who averaged 17.7 points for Portland State and was an allconference selection in the Big Sky.
“They’re stacked,” Seiko said. “We’re built to get up and down the court quick,” said coach Bobby Hurley, whose team ranks ninth nationally in offensive efficiency in the Kenpom.com metric. “We’re built to score points in bunches if we get going. We have to play to our strengths and live with the results.”
Seiko’s team is, well, built a bit differently. It scored 20 points in the first half against Pepperdine on Sunday … and won.
There are no McDonald’s AllAmericans, no five-star prospects, only a couple guys who were rated four stars by one of the recruiting services, a guy from Ghana, a guy from Sudan, a guy from the Canary Islands. A JC transfer who had no college offers out of high school starts at point guard. A 5-foot-8 guy comes off the bench.
You want balanced scoring?
Nine different players have scored nine or more points in a game this season, and no one has had more than 17.
“A game of different styles,” Hurley said. “So, who’s going to be able to control that and dictate some of the terms?”
Arizona State is averaging 84.5 points. SDSU is allowing 54.3.
With Martin, whom Seiko considers the quickest guard in college basketball, conducting the orchestra, the Sun Devils rank 16th in tempo at 75.7 possessions per game. The Aztecs are 329th.
The Aztecs assisted on 16 of 27 baskets in a 15-point win against then-No. 22 UCLA. The Sun Devils had one assist in the first half of an 83-74 loss against No. 9 Villanova.
“I really respect as a coach, just watching film, how San Diego State plays, how they defend, how unselfish they play,” Hurley said. “They’re a very deep team, they play together, they play to win. Those are great habits. You can tell there’s a really good culture there. They have a physicality and mental toughness about them that’s noticeable when you watch them.
“If you’re weak-minded or you’re not strong with the ball, in a game like this they could really expose you. … They kind of really just grind you up.”
Offense versus defense, talent versus team, Martin versus Seiko. No. 23 vs. No. 24. “Big-time players make bigtime shots, and that’s what Arizona State has,” SDSU coach Brian Dutcher said. “We can do a great job defensively, but at any moment they’ve got guys who can bounce up and make shots. We just have to do our best to contest those shots and hopefully they miss enough where we can stay in the game.
“We stay true to our culture, which is we guard hard and we play a complete game for 40 minutes, stay focused and give ourselves a chance to win.”