Aggies dominate UVU, prepare for Duke
With 14:08 left in the first half, Utah Stat point guard Shane Rector caught a pass beyond the 3-point line, nearly standing on the Aggie bull logo 22 feet from the hoop. His defender, afraid of Rector’s ability to break down a defense, played off of him. Rector surveyed the defense like a king looking over his fiefdom and, just as easy as you like, flicked a pass to Jalen Moore for an alley-oop dunk that ignited the Spectrum crowd.
The dunk came as part of an 8-0 run – and an extended 22-8 run – that helped the Aggies overcome an early deficit on their way to an 81-55 win over Utah Valley University on Tuesday night.
“It was a game of runs,” said junior forward Jalen Moore. “They went on theirs and we went on ours and ours was bigger than theirs.”
The win pushed USU to 4-0 on the season and 11-0 all-time against the Wolverines.
USU struggled to corral the visitors early, allowing Utah Valley to get to the rim for easy layups multiple times in the first four minutes of the game. A layup by junior forward Konner Frey – a former Aggie – put the Wolverines up four, prompting Utah State head coach Tim Duryea to call a timeout with 16:11 left in the first half.
“He just told us to get ready to play,” Moore said. “Marcel [Davis, another former Aggie] and Konner were going to play really hard and that’s what they were doing. They were playing harder than our guys were.”
Two minutes later, Moore’s dunk gave the Aggies a four-point lead they would never relinquish.
“Credit to our guys,” Duryea said. “We made a couple of adjustments there and I thought we firmed up defensively, handled them on the boards and, offensively, we did a good job sharing the ball.”
Senior guard Chris Smith carried the USU offense early, scoring with spinning layups for four of the Aggies’ first six points. He also sparked the eight-point run that gave USU the lead, scoring in the paint to start the run and adding a 3-pointer in the middle of it. Smith was the Aggies’ leading scorer in the game with 17 points on 7 of 10 shooting.
USU’s bench outscored the opponent’s bench for the fourth straight game, led by a 17-point, 14-rebound performance from redshirt junior Lew Evans. It’s the second time he’s scored in double digits this season.
“Coach gets on us every day in practice, ‘You need to crash the boards, crash the boards, crash the boards,’” Evans said. “Coach D has told me, ‘You need to go at the glass hard, you need to get rebounds, we need you to rebound for us.”
“If we don’t go, he’s got this scoring system that we get minus one,” Evans said. “So I’m like, ‘I need to go every single time.’ They just came to me and I finished some of them and I got some of them. It was a good night.”
The Aggies dominated UVU on the boards, outrebounding the Wolverines 46-25 and 11-7 on the offensive glass. Evans paced Utah State with five offensive boards and freshman Quinn Taylor came off the bench for eight total rebounds, including two offensive.
“We’ve gotten those loose balls that we needed to get and rebounded much better than last year,” Evans said.
The focus for USU turns now to the next game on the schedule, a trip to Durham, North Carolina to play defending national champion Duke on Sunday.
“We’ll get ready for them tomorrow,” Moore said. “Coach Duryea said the main thing is you’ve just got to be able to rebound against them. We have confidence that we can definitely play with them, guard them and make them guard us.”
“You’re playing a team and a program that sets the gold-standard for how hard you have to play, how hard you have to compete at this level,” Duryea said. “I’m excited to see how our guys respond to that.”
– thomas.sorenson@aggiemail.usu.edu
– Twitter: @tomcat340