San Diego State - 71, Creighton - 53
BRIAN DUTCHER: I love my team, but I don't know what I'm going to get from them in November. It's a challenging schedule -- Gonzaga, then Creighton, then Oregon and then someone else.
So I know this team is going to be good, but I don't know how soon it's going to be good. It was good tonight. Now can it be good tomorrow? That's the question.
I've got two really good sophomores sitting up here. And I've got a redshirt freshman in the starting lineup. And I've got some good experience but new to our team.
I sit and watch these other teams with eight new pieces. I'm, like, damn, that coach is doing a good job. And I don't know if I'm doing a good job or not. I'm trying. We're trying. We're trying to figure it out on the fly.
And the best lessons to learn are lessons you learn when you win. You're going to take some Ls in those lessons, like we did against the Zags. Or you're going to be fortunate enough to play Creighton without arguably their most important player, Ashworth.
But that's part of the game, too. We've got guys hurt and everybody has guys hurt. But obviously that hurt them tonight not having Steven in the lineup. But we took advantage of it, to our credit. We took care of the ball, only eight turnovers. We shot a high percentage. And our defense is what we hang our hat on.
It's what Aztec basketball is, it's about defense. And it's easier to defend when the ball's going in. I understand that. But our program is based on defending when it doesn't go in. We'll see if we can do that when we run into our next game; if we end up getting behind, if we can defend at that level.
I'm proud of our guys, proud of our effort and proud of our growth as a team.
Q. BJ, you mentioned before the season one of the things you wanted out of this year was more minutes. How does it feel to be getting those minutes and playing so well so far?
BJ DAVIS: It feels good. All the work that we put in as a collective, and just for me to be able to go out there and perform, it feels great. Just going to keep working and keep trusting the coaches, keep trusting my teammates.
Q. What are the challenges going against a shot blocker like Kalkbrenner?
MILES BYRD: Being solid, getting two feet when you drive. It's easy to, especially with good competition, it's easy to drive out of control and off balance. But when you have a shot blocker like that, it's easier for a team like that to fan out on a drive. So guarding the two on two on the ball screen, just playing off two feet and being sure of your decisions.
Q. Just talk about the last eight days, (indiscernible) practice every day, but the last week of practice. I know you didn't go against the scout team as much as you normally do. You went pretty hard and coaches were on you pretty hard. What happened in those days that elevated to you this level?
BJ DAVIS: The coaches did a great job just emphasizing the importance of just having urgency. Playing with urgency and being alert and not being a step behind. Being proactive if anything. They did a good job preaching that to us. And we go out there try to implement it.
MILES BYRD: I think just when you have this big of a week leading up to a team -- especially a team when they have a guy like Kalkbrenner, it allowed us a lot more time to go over scout.
We have a lot of new and young guys. That was a big plus for us, getting extra time to go over scout. And just the extra week of going hard and attacking each other in practice every day and making each other better.
Q. What have you seen out of BJ this season?
MILES BYRD: He's a killer. I love seeing what BJ is doing. We keep talking about it. We're from the same area and been playing against each other since middle school. To see each other come out here and perform like this, we're just super excited.
Q. BJ, what was it today that you saw your opportunities in the offense to set a career high at 18 points?
BJ DAVIS: I just seen, you know, where I had advantages in certain places and I took them. So I kind of just tried to hunt my shot and stay ready because any given moment that ball could be swung my way. So just really being ready to just make plays.
Q. BJ, you guys got out early on transition, (indiscernible) opportunity, (indiscernible) early in the second. What did their turnovers do to give your offense life?
BJ DAVIS: Like Coach said, turnovers lead to fast breaks. When they turned it over we were capitalizing on the fast breaks.
Really just understanding when we get steals they want us to run so let's go run. We've got great coaches that just let us play and give us freedom on offense. It really takes a lot of pressure away from us. We can just go out there and play.
Q. Miles, one of the big differences of this year's team and last year's team is rim protection. You entered the game No. 2 in blocks. You had two in one play, you had one and (indiscernible) had one what's the difference there and how much does that change when you (indiscernible) defense?
MILES BYRD: A guy like Magoon takes so much pressure off of you defensively. I wouldn't say a safety blanket, but he's definitely a guy where you're comfortable if you're beat by a step to just peel off and go find a body and box out because you trust a 7-footer who moves like Goon to goes up and block a shot.
I think this year we're so long and athletic that it's going to be a sure thing that we come in the game, get a lot of blocks and deflections and stuff like that.
Q. What was your focus or philosophy in practice this past week, getting it going? Usually during the season you don't see the first two units go that hard against each other.
BRIAN DUTCHER: We compete hard. I don't want get guys hurt. That's the thing, you compete hard, you run the risk of hurting one another. We don't want that to happen.
We had the advantage of extra days of prep. We had a full week since Gonzaga to get ready. Basically stole Nebraska's game plan. Played them front and back as best we could, tried to get the shooters. Without Ashworth, we were able to succeed in that. Takes a certain part of their game away not having him. But Greg's a good coach and he'll get it solved. I'm just happy he didn't get it solved against us.
But having a player short definitely hurt their team. And our depth is great. I mean, we don't really drop off. We go to the bench, and you're bringing good players in. And two true freshmen and transfers that had a lot of experience and I think we're a really deep team.
I don't feel like we're buying time when I go to my bench. Our bench is productive. That's how you're able to grow a lead where you don't rest guys and you maintain it. We grew the lead from our bench at times. So we're deep, and I like that too.
Q. Did Magoon's shot to end the half energize the team?
BRIAN DUTCHER: Well, it energized me. That's the good news. Magoon, he played in our closed door scrimmage against UCLA -- played really well. He had like eight points. Then I think he played two Division I games without a point.
He's a 7-foot young freshman learning how to play. He's picking and choosing his moments. He hit two hard shots off the dribble. Then he hit a couple of catch-and-shoot threes. He's dangerous but he's still young. Went from 185 to 205 in one year. As he continues to gain strength, his game will get better. But right now, he's doing a really good job as a young freshman playing out on the perimeter. That's hard to do. He was a center in high school that had freedom to go out and shoot, but now he's playing the power four, stretch four, and we're asking a lot of him, and he's growing with every game. That's the good news.
Q. What were your original thoughts on playing Kalkbrenner before you saw the Nebraska game and how did Nebraska game tweak that plan?
BRIAN DUTCHER: It's just the backside defender. Someone that good, we try three-quarter wrap or front. We tried the front.
And you look at our back-to-back games, we had to play Ike and Huff from Gonzaga and follow up with Kalkbrenner. I don't know who else -- and we'll play Bittle tomorrow.
We're playing as good of bigs as there are in our three-game stretch as anybody in the country has to play. We have to grow up fast and learn how to play these guys and not give in and when to double and how to play them.
We're just stacking games. We're playing good competition, trying to learn something about ourselves, yet still play well. So this is a great event for us to be in for that to happen.
Q. You've been pretty complimentary of Steven Ashworth while you're up here. How different does Creighton look with him and without him? You've watched --
BRIAN DUTCHER: He's like the Curry of college basketball. He moves so much without the ball. Shoots behind screens. Even if you go over, he can still get it off. I had to deal with him at Utah State. This is not a guy watching tape of a guy and saying he's really good. This is having played against him for multiple years, never leaving him on the floor, chasing him everywhere, just knowing how hard it is.
So he's got my utmost respect. I tried to get him out of the portal and he wouldn't come. That's how much I loved him.
But he makes a difference. The quicker he can get healthy, the better they'll be. It's amazing what players do for coaching. And he's a very good one.
Q. Seems there's a point of emphasis to get to the paint early, score there, how did that set the tone physically open up things for you to move the game along?
BRIAN DUTCHER: As much as we tried to follow the game plan, our guys are still players. We told them you're not going to drive in there and keep going and score over Kalkbrenner. You'll get one that will be fool's gold and then everything else where you don't play to two feet or you don't shoot mid-range or you don't change your angles, you're not going to score those. And he blocked all of them.
Eventually we got to the point where we started playing on two feet and rolling the post where he had to at least leave us for a second. But as much as you talk to players and you work on it for a week, they still want to challenge them, and every time they did, he blocked it.
Q. I think you've played here, I think it's 75th time you played in Vegas in the last 15-plus seasons. You play here a lot and you've had incredible success here. Is it just a comfort coming here, it's a short trip, your players --
BRIAN DUTCHER: It's a 45-minute flight from San Diego. Our fans travel. They're used to Vegas. They're used to following us here. For an 11:00 game, I thought we had a lot, lot of fans. And they'll grow. There will be more the next game.
And then the question is, will anybody come back after Thanksgiving? That I can't answer. They'll go home, maybe, for Thanksgiving. If we win two games and we're playing in the title, they'll come back. But otherwise I don't know if they'll make the trip back. But we travel, our fans travel and they give us tremendous support.
Q. When you were first invited to this event, what did you think and how did you make the decision to participate from an event standpoint?
BRIAN DUTCHER: It was a no-brainer for us. It was like, yes, anytime, anyplace. And the question was, you know, is the money really going to be there? But for us, the money, yeah, the money is critically important. And this is a great event for that. But for us to play this talent level that we get to play and our flight from our campus -- I don't want to tell them this because they might not pay us, but I would have come for free to play this kind of competition.
We're not in a Power Four league. It's hard for us to play these kind of teams. So we have to build a resumé in November. So it's Gonzaga, it's Creighton, it's Oregon and it's someone from the other side. And those are games we have to take to give ourselves a chance if we don't have the year we want to have in conference to get an at-large bid. These are the games that will do it, with these kind of games.
Q. Given you have such a young team, given you don't have Reese until December, January, how much pressure does it take off to have sort of a resumé win against a team that's going to be very good?
BRIAN DUTCHER: Yeah, you win a game and you get greedy. Now you think maybe we can get two here now.
When you go to these events with all these teams, you go, God, we can't lose them all. It's modeling. Every time you go to those, you look at who you're going to play and you're, like, holy smokes, I hope we're the team that doesn't leave with no wins. It can happen at these events.
We got one. Now we have to get greedy, get two and try to get a third if we can. We're playing a good Oregon team. It's nice to know our opponent already because now we can go in and not have to wait until this game's over to know who we're playing.
We know who we're playing. We have had assistant coaches working on the game like everybody else knows their second opponent. Now we'll go into the film room, do a walk-through, get ready for tomorrow.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports