Game recap of Aztecs 65-63 win against the Arizona State Sun Devils
Heading into the fourth game of the year after a rough loss at BYU, SDSU looked to show their dominance. Matched up against a PAC-12 team that recently fell to UC Riverside on a half-court three at the buzzer, ASU was without one of their leading scorers, Marcus Bagley.
SDSU had just beaten UC Riverside 66-53 a little over a week ago. A 13 point win against an average team, ASU only lost to UCR by one point. While many expected a dominant win against a team without Marcus Bagley, that was not the case.
The first half was highlighted by high energy from starting power forward Keshad Johnson but other than that, there wasn’t anything for SDSU fans to look forward to in the second half. At the half, the Aztecs were down two. This is against a team that last year in the PAC-12 was 11-14!
Early in the second half, Coach Dutcher called a timeout after going down 6. Luckily, after Lamont Butler was fouled, he knocked down the first free throw and missed the second, but the Aztecs grabbed the rebound and Adam Seiko knocked down one of the biggest threes of the night. If it weren’t for this series it could have gotten ugly, quickly.
In the final minutes, the play was sloppy and it did not look like the Aztecs would send their fans home happy. Matt Bradley was at the line shooting free throws, and if he knocked down both attempts, the worst outcome possible would be overtime. Bradley missed the second free throw, ASU grabbed the rebound, pushed it up the court, and had what felt like eight attempts to win the game. ASU went on to airball their final attempt and the fans were finally able to breathe again.
The last few sequences were hard to watch, with so many offensive rebounds and chances to win the game for ASU. A win is a win but of the three wins for the Aztecs this year, none of them have shown them to be contenders against some of the more dominant teams they’ll go on to face this season.
Hear my thoughts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sdsu-basketball-talk-w-cook-talks/id1584585210?i=1000542434092
My thoughts and experience: https://youtu.be/16tV4M4x5bA