Aggies down Mitchell-less Aztecs, sweep SDSU for first time
Utah State pulled off a 10-point second-half rally against a shorthanded San Diego State team, coming away with a 64-59 victory to complete the season sweep of the Aztecs for the first time in team history.
The comeback featured a collection of USU’s non-star players, each of whom performed their own heroics en route to the W. Freshman guard Steven Ashworth scored 11 of his game-high 17 points in the second, Brock Miller had eight points in the first five minutes of the second and Alphonso Anderson played key minutes down the stretch, grabbing several key rebounds and scoring nine points, all of which were in the second half.
“I think that was the definition of a team win,” Ashworth said. “A lot of guys stepping up, a lot of guys making plays.”
“Everybody impacts winning,” USU head coach Craig Smith said. “And I think we saw that in the last 20 minutes of the game where everybody put their best foot forward and somehow found a way to win.”
Having won by 12 points in game one and with SDSU being without its leading scorer, Matt Mitchell, due to an injury suffered in the previous game, Utah State appeared primed for an easy sweep. But the Aztecs were having none of it in the first half. Their bench filled in the missing scoring and the team’s defense pressured the Aggies into an inefficient stupor. At the break, Utah State trailed the visiting Aztecs 32-22.
“San Diego State played really well,” USU head coach Craig Smith said. “We knew they were going to. They’re a championship-level team for a reason. They’re very good, they play tough and they’re tough-minded.”
12 times in the first half, USU turned the ball over. Five of those were SDSU steals but the Aggies committed the additional seven on their own, largely travels and offensive fouls. These turnovers were key in keeping SDSU in the game early.
USU held a 9-2 lead after the opening five minutes and over the next roughly four minutes, SDSU would only score two more points. But the Aggies hardly scored either and had four consecutive turnovers as part of that short span, which kept them completely out of their offense. SDSU jumped the passing lanes aggressively, led by Lamont Butler who jumped one pass for a pick-six dunk and on another play reached in and swiped the ball completely clean from the dribble of Justin Bean. Butler wound up with four first-half steals (he finished the game with five)
“The first half got off to a good start,” Smith said. “Then we were not good in any phase the last 10 minutes. Turnovers were killing us on both ends of the floor. On the offensive end, we had no pace. We looked like we had no direction. We had a deer in the headlights look, and that’s a credit to San Diego State. They were very aggressive and took us out of some of our stuff, then they ramped it up another notch. That affected our defense, some of that was catastrophic turnovers where our offense was their best offense.”
The absence of a pulling-away run by USU left the score 11-4 as the latter end of the first half approached. And that’s when SDSU began their move.
In the first seven minutes of the half, the Aztecs shot 2 of 8 on field goal attempts. Over the final 13, they were 11 of 19 from the field with just two turnovers. Utah State in the same final 13 minutes shot a grand 4 of 13 overall. Early on, USU created good looks, but between possessions that ended in turnovers, they began to force up incredibly unadvisable shots. Smith, as he has in the past, lamented the lack of post touches for their star big, Neemias Queta who had two shot attempts in the first half.
“We didn’t find (Queta) enough early,” Smith said. “It’s one thing we talked about — well there’s plenty of things we addressed at halftime — but one of them was ‘Why are we only throwing to Queta on the block when we call a play? Why can’t we just do that out of the flow of our offense?'”
After getting an earful from Smith at the halftime break, the Aggies came out with a renewed vigor that defied every bad first-half trend. They opened the half on a blistering 13-2 run, suffocating the life out of a previously red-hot Aztec side while generating an effective and balanced offense. Miller’s eight second-half points all came in this span where he hit a long pull-up two and then a pair of 3-pointers, the latter of which gave its first lead in just over 11 minutes of game time.
Queta too got involved early on both ends. He had the Aggies’ first bucket of the comeback and another free throw to contribute to the 13 points of that run. But his main contributions came on defense where he affected several inside shots and reeled in the rebounds. Queta finished the night with a full stat sheet consisting of 10 points, 10 rebounds, four assists and five blocks (and five turnovers) on 4 of 6 shooting.
The comeback took all of five minutes, but the Aggies were never truly out of the woods until the final buzzer sounded. No double-digit cushion this time. But that’s where Ashworth and Anderson made their names known. The two combined for 13 free throw attempts, all in the second half with Ashworth going a perfect 8 for 8 and Anderson going 5 of 6. Six of those combined 13 attempts were in the final five minutes with the game hotly contested.
Free throws wound up being the necessary offense for the Aggies to win. The final USU field goal was a tip-in by Marco Anthony with 3:31 left to go that put the Aggies up 57-53. The remaining seven points all came on free throws and combined with defense was plenty enough to pull off the win in the Spectrum.
Saturday’s win makes 10 in a row for Utah State, eight straight in conference play. It extends the team’s best-ever start to conference play since joining the Mountain West and is the best conference start since the 2010-11 season where the Aggies began their WAC slate with 11 straight wins.