AZTECS TO PLAY SERIES WITH GONZAGA
West Coast powers will play Dec. 29 in Spokane, here in ’24
One way of knowing how good San Diego State basketball coach Brian Dutcher thinks his team might be is to look at his nonconference schedule. The harder it is, the better he thinks they’ll be.
And the Aztecs just added a road game at Gonzaga.
The Dec. 29 encounter in Spokane, Wash., will be the first of a home-and-home series, with the plan to play the return game at Viejas Arena in 2024. It matches the NCAA Tournament runner-up from two of the last three seasons.
“It must mean I feel pretty good about my job security,” Dutcher joked, “playing this kind of schedule.”
The nonconference already was difficult, as much for the opposition as locations, and this adds a whole other dimension. The Bulldogs rarely lose at cozy McCarthey Athletic Center — aka “The Kennel” — and they reloaded during the offseason with several high-profile transfers and incoming freshmen.
It now gives the Aztecs six nonconference games away from Viejas Arena: at BYU on Nov. 10; at Grand Canyon (where they lost their last trip); at UC San Diego in the finale of a two-for-one series; two games at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas as part of the Continental Tire Main Event against Xavier, Saint Mary’s or Washington; and now at Gonzaga.
“I don’t know how the teams are that we’re going to play — I think they’re going to be good,” Dutcher said. “But I know the atmospheres are going to be out of this world. I’ve got a group that I feel has played in enough of those atmospheres where we won’t shy away from that. We’ll embrace that and see where we’re at.”
And Dutcher might not be done. He mentioned “one more neutral game we’re trying to finish up” that would give them a seventh nonconference opponent away from the fortress of Viejas Arena.
That opponent is believed to be Cal. The Bears are entered in the SoCal Challenge, an eight-team event during
Thanksgiving week at JSerra High in San Juan Capistrano. SDSU couldn’t play in it, since they’re already in the Las Vegas tournament (and NCAA rules allow only one nonconference multi-team event per season), but they could arrange a one-off game before or after in the area.
The Aztecs don’t have a Thanksgiving commitment this season (the Las Vegas event is the weekend before). And new Cal coach Mark Madsen, who has upgraded the roster with several transfers, has told people he hopes to play the Aztecs during the trip.
They are already hosting one Pac-12 team, Stanford, this season. The other known home game is the Nov. 6 opener against Cal State Fullerton, leaving them with probably three more — likely one-off “buy” games at Viejas.
Talks with Gonzaga started last spring, stalled and then accelerated in the last few days.
One complication is Dec. 29 is a Friday and the Aztecs open the Mountain West season the following Tuesday or Wednesday. It will be interesting, given their recent spat over SDSU’s potential exit to the Pac-12, to see whether the conference is kind and lets the Aztecs open at home or sends them directly on the road from Spokane to a tough altitude game in the mountains.
“It backs up to conference, and that’s always a concern,” Dutcher said. “You’re going to come back from Christmas break, get on a plane, fly up there and play, then play your conference opener as early as that next Tuesday.
“But at the end of the day, I think everyone knows we’re not
ducking anybody competitively. We’re worried about the conference opener, but I’m trying to play as many competitive games as we can that will help our résumé come March and put us in a position to get a high seed in the NCAA Tournament if we have the kind of year we want to have.”
It will be the fifth time SDSU and Gonzaga have met in men’s basketball, each winning two. It is the third time they have played at “The Kennel,” also a split. SDSU and Kawhi Leonard famously upset the Bulldogs 79-76 in 2010 in a game that introduced the Aztecs to the college basketball world. They returned to Spokane in 2016 with less success, losing 69-48.
The other two games in the all-time series were a 72-69 Gonzaga win in 1959 in Portland’s City of Rose Tournament, and a 72-70 SDSU win in 2017 against the 12th-ranked Bulldogs at soldout Viejas Arena.
ESPN has Gonzaga and SDSU ranked eighth and 12th, respectively, in its preseason rankings.
The Bulldogs lost All-American post Drew Timme and versatile wing Julian Strawther but added two familiar faces to SDSU fans in Wyoming center Graham Ike, the Mountain West’s Preseason Player of the Year who sat out last season with a leg injury, and Creighton point guard Ryan Nembhard. Also transferring in from just down
the street is 6-foot-7 Steele Venters, the Big Sky Player of the Year at Eastern Washington.
Joining them are returning starters Nolan Hickman and Anton Watson, plus a pair of fourstar recruits in Dusty Stromer and Marcus Adams Jr. (who decommitted from Kansas) and South Korean under-19 national team sensation Jun Seok Yeo.
“I love it, I love it,” senior guard Lamont Butler said. “I love to compete against high-level teams and be in great atmospheres. It just hypes you up. This is a winning program, and to show that we can win against these high-level programs is bigtime for us.”