Lobos blast SJSU; weird season gets weirder
ALBUQUERQUE — University of New Mexico men’s basketball coach Paul Weir proudly holds a doctorate and is introduced before every home game as, “Doctor Paul Weir.”
It’ll take all those advanced degrees and academic accomplishments — not to mention a few pie charts and bar graphs — for the Lobos’ third-year coach to try explaining Tuesday night’s unpredictable blowout win in what is easily one of the weirdest seasons in recent memory.
Beaten by 33 by Colorado State and 21 by UNLV in the days leading into Tuesday’s visit from San Jose State, Weir’s Lobos rolled to an 86-59 rout of the Spartans for their 15th straight win at home. Everything UNM (16-5 overall, 5-3 Mountain West) did in the game flew in the face of rational thought, the kind that suggested the Lobos were a rudderless ship in rough seas now that four of the five players who started each of the season’s first 13 games are out of action.
The list of casualties grew by one giant missing piece Tuesday as minutes before the game, senior JaQuan Lyle was scratched for what was described as a knee injury suffered in the loss to UNLV on Saturday. The team’s leading scorer and arguably its most valuable player, he joins guard Vance Jackson on the injury list.
Jackson has missed two straight games and neither he nor Lyle have a timetable for their return. In their wake is a makeshift lineup seemingly held together with spit and duct tape, yet somehow, some way that mix-n-match group looked as good as the team has all season.
On paper, Tuesday’s game looked like a disaster waiting to happen. Seldom-used sophomore Tavian Percy was thrust into the starting lineup as a point guard and bit players like Keith McGee and walk-on Jordan Arroyo, plus barely seen freshman Emmanual Kuac got a handful of quality minutes.
Toss in the fact that Zane Martin is now at the top of the depth chart at point guard until Lyle returns, and it’s not a great mix.
“Zane has kind of reluctantly taken on the point guard position most of the year,” Weir said. “He’s a scorer. He likes scoring, he’s good at it. But he’s also our next-best point guard right now.”
Against SJSU, he everything he needed to. He finished with 20 points and four assists, quarterbacking a more conservative Lobo offense that committed just 11 turnovers — five below their season average.
“We’re a very good 5-on-5 basketball team,” Weir said. “We can defend in the half-court and we can score in the halfcourt. The game gets a little away from us if we rush and we take bad shots or we do too much defensively, and it gets us into a game that we’re not great at.”
Things started well enough, with the Lobos scoring four points in the first 39 seconds on their way to an 8-1 lead at the first media timeout. The sequence ended with a wild flurry as Makuach Maluach had the ball stripped from him near midcourt, leading to a fastbreak the other way. He stuck with it and blocked SJSU’s Brae Ivey and Seneca Knight less than a second apart, then knocked the loose ball off the Spartans for a turnover.
The margin grew to double digits two minutes later and the Lobos wound up extending the lead to as many as 31 before it was over. Most everything the team did worked — except for the rare possession or two that tested Weir’s patience.
With his team nursing a four-possession lead early in the second half, Weir lowered himself into a catcher’s squat near the scorer’s table in just enough time to watch power forward Corey Manigault launch a 3-point try from the wing just in front of him.
It missed. Badly.
Weir immediately dipped his gaze to the floor and cupped his hands over his ears. He stayed in that position, his fingers wrapped around to the back of his skull as they massaged his lower hairline for several moments.
Although he’s been known to hit a 3 every now and again, the 6-foot-9 Manigault is the team’s only remaining post player, and it’s clear that Weir wants him parked in the paint. His stats from Tuesday’s game: 21 points on 8-for-13 shooting, including a pair of missed 3-point shots.
Maluach posted a double-double with 15 points and 13 rebounds while McGee chipped in with 10 points in a season-high 24 minutes.
Beaten by San Jose State on New Year’s Day, the Lobos found that life on the margins is a lot easier when the opponent’s 3-point shots come nowhere close. Spartans forward Richard Washington buried a career-high seven 3-balls in the win three weeks ago. The entire SJSU roster made just 5 of 25 tries on Tuesday and Washington’s only bucket was a meaningless 3 late in the game.
Afterward, Weir admitted that this season has been one that’s not easy to deal with.
“It’s unusual, I wish I could say sometimes things happen in a season — guys get hurt, guys get academically ineligible, different things kind of happen as you can see across the country,” Weir said. “What we’ve had is very unusual. I’m hopeful in time those things will play themselves out to a point that we’ll all know a lot more about it on what exactly it means about me or about us. But right now we have what we have.”
On Tuesday against all the odds, having what they have was more than good enough.
NOTES
Weir’s streak of wearing a V-neck red sweater was snapped at 59 games. As part of a cancer awareness promotion he wore a white dress shirt with pink tie and white sneakers. Afterward he joked that me might leave the sweater in the closet, given Tuesday’s blowout win . ... Walk-on Clay Patterson had a career-high four points, all on free throws in the final three minutes . ... SJSU outrebounded UNM 16-5 on the offensive glass . ... Up next for UNM is a trip to Reno, Nev., on Saturday and a date with a pair of former Lobos head coaches. Steve Alford is now the head coach at Nevada and his top assistant is former Lobo coach Craig Neal. Both men worked on the same staff as Weir at Iowa before Alford took the job at New Mexico.