A game in no-mans land: Aggies defeat unaccredited Bristol 96-53
Utah State men’s basketball continued its undefeated preseason Wednesday night with a win against Bristol University in the Dee Glen Spectrum.
Head coach Tim Duryea said when the game was originally contracted, the Bears of Bristol were a team that had athletic accreditation from their university, but since that time the dynamic has shifted to strictly academic, so this game meant little to the NCAA-sanctioned Aggies.
Duryea said because the game doesn’t count as an official game or an exhibition game, it was basically a game in “no-man’s land.”
But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a fun one to watch.
After a slow first minute or so after the 7:00 p.m. tip-off, Utah State started into a rally after Norbert Janicek made his second foul shot and the first shot of the game. By the 15:24 mark, the score was 16-6 and all but ten of those total points were three-pointers.
“We started off shooting a lot of threes because it was really open at first and we didn’t feel like turning down shots,” said redshirt sophomore Alexis Dargenton. “Coach reminded us that we have a big size advantage on them and we needed to get the ball inside more.”
The other points scored by the Aggies at that time were from senior guard Shane Rector, who led the team with ten points at the half.
“Coach always tells me it’s up to the point guard to get the team going,” Rector said. “So that’s what I was trying to do and luckily I was able to do that tonight.”
The Aggies led 52-29 by the end of the half, with 13 assists compared to Bristol’s seven.
If three-pointers were the theme for the first half, dunks were the theme for the second, but only on the Aggie side of things. The highlight of the team’s five second-half dunks was indisputably the Koby McEwen to Rector alley-oop about seven minutes into the half.
McEwen got the ball down the court after an Aggie defensive rebound and Rector said that was what they were planning for.
“It was funny, Koby and I were talking about it before the game,” Rector said. “Once he saw me, we made that eye contact and it was showtime.”
That dunk brought the score to 63-35, and was followed closely by dunks from Dargenton, sophomore forward Quinn Taylor and freshman guard Diogo Brito.
The overall point distribution for Utah State is a trend, and Duryea said it’s part of his philosophy with these preseason games.
The Aggies had 50 points off the bench tonight and there wasn’t a player who saw the floor that had less than five points. Rector led with 16, followed by Norbert Janicek and Quinn Taylor with 12 and 11 points respectively.
Bristol struggled to put points on the board throughout the rest of the game, scoring just 24 points in the second half, while the Aggies put up 44.
Turnovers weren’t a pretty site for either side, but USU had 32 more rebounds than the Bristol Bears. That’s something Duryea wanted to make sure of tonight.
“Coach wanted us to chase every ball, defensively, offensively,” Dargenton said, who recorded eight rebounds on the night. “That’s kind of my job on the team right now – get a lot of boards and save the shots.”
Janicek led the team with nine rebounds on the night, the team shot an overall 58 percent, and recorded 25 total assists.