Aggies too big for Utes
Just about everything seemed to right for the Utah State Aggies (3-1) to get the win over the University of Utah Utes (3-1).
Junior forward Brady Jardine scored a career-high 20 points on 6-of-7 shooting from the floor and 8-of-10 shooting from the free-throw line, and grabbed career-high of 13 rebounds to lead the Aggies over the Utes Wednesday night, 79-62.
“That’s as good as Brady Jardine has had as an Aggie,” Aggie head coach Stew Morrill said. “That was really nice to see. He was active. He was active on the boards and confident making shots and making free-throws.”
Jardine said, “I’ve had some missed shots and things in the last couple of games; struggled a little bit and tonight I said forget it. I’m going to go to play. I’m going to have fun. We lost at BYU last week; a tough big in-state loss and to have Utah come tonight with all the talk of them not coming back maybe for a while, we wanted to make sure we sent them out on the right note.”
Jardine’s career performance included four rim-rocking dunks that brought the Aggie faithful to their feet.
“I got sick of missing lay-ups last week, and so I told my team that if I had the chance tonight I was going smash it,” Jardine said. “I give it to my teammates for getting me the ball in easy-to-score places. I had wide open dunks because they got it to me where it was easy.”
The Aggies were able to out-hustle the longer Utes, and stop the Utes from trying to get into any type of offensive flow. The Utes two 7-foot big men, sophomore Jason Washburn and junior David Foster combined for three points and four rebounds. Junior forward Will Clyburn led the Utes with 16 points in 33 minutes of play.
“We’ll take it,” Morrill said. “We’ll be excited about it. It’s an in-state win by a pretty good margin. We played really hard. Everything wasn’t perfect out there. Everything never is. I’m not going to pick apart the things we didn’t do, because we did enough good things to get a good, solid win. We rebounded the ball. We played really hard defensively.”
The Aggies held the Utes to 37.9 percent shooting from the floor and 21.1 percent from 3-point land. The Utes came out firing in the second half and went on the 12-4 run capped by a lay-up from junior guard Josh Watkins who would finish with 15 points. The Aggies would respond with an 11-1 run and would lead by double digits most of a remainder of the game.
“We came out flat a little bit, but luckily we bounced back,” Wesley said. “We didn’t let them take the lead at all. That’s what we need to do. When teams go on runs, we’ve gotta bounce back and go on a run of our own. Luckily we contained their run and went on a run on our own.”
Morrill said, “We didn’t come out quite as hard defensively in the first half. They made some good plays. We have a lot of good players who have been through a lot. They just hung solid and started making plays.”
Senior forward Tai Wesley was the perfect complement to Jardine, as he picked up a season-high 21 points on 7-of-13 shooting from the floor and 2-of-2 shooting from the 3-point range. Wesley had only made two 3-pointers his whole career prior to this game.
“I keep saying that I have been working on my game,” Wesley said. “I had to showcase a little bit of the deep range tonight. The first one was in the flow of the game. I caught the ball, I was wide open and it felt good. The second one, I just kinda wanted to shoot it because the shot clock was down. It happened to go down for me. Going 2-for-2 was nice.”
Wesley was also to stay out of foul trouble for the entire game, and didn’t commit his first foul until the 10 minute mark of the second half.
“Starting the game, all I had in my head was: don’t foul, don’t foul,” Wesley said. “I was able to stay out of foul trouble which contributed to playing a lot of minutes tonight. I think it was part of the way the game went. They really didn’t try to pound it inside. They were more penetrate to kick. I really didn’t have to guard a guy one-on-one tonight so that helped.”
Morrill said, “Tai is just playing good every night out. It was nice to keep him out a few more minutes tonight.”
Not everything went right for the Aggies, but Morrill expressed the need for his team to feel good about the win despite all the expectations.
“Our guys need to feel good about it,” Morrill said. “When you are supposed to have a good basketball team you can find yourself analyzing every little thing and what we didn’t do and what we need to do. We just beat the University of Utah by a good margin. We’re gonna feel good about, enjoy our Thanksgiving dinner and get ready for the next one.”
The Aggies will face the Northeastern Huskies on Saturday. That game is scheduled to tip-off at 7:05 p.m. inside the Spectrum.
-ty.d.hus@aggiemail.usu.edu