LAS VEGAS — Not exactly what the 19th-ranked team in Division I basketball had in mind.
San Diego State is probably fortunate to be headed to the Mountain West Tournament semifinals Friday after surviving its worst performance of the season — of two seasons, really — with a 69-66 quarterfinals victory Thursday afternoon against a Wyoming team it beat by, ahem, 30 and 27 points in late January.
Now the Aztecs get the winner between fourth-seeded Boise State and fifth-seeded Nevada.
Before then, they’ll need to rediscover the mojo that got them this far.
The bad: They looked frustrated and flustered by the eighth-seeded Cowboys’ strategy to take the air out of the ball and reduce possessions after letting the Aztecs score a season-high 98 points on them in January.
The good: They held it together enough to endure a game in a final, harrowing 19 minutes in which neither team led by more than three points.
Here’s how the last 90 seconds went:
The Aztecs were ahead 65-64 and twice defended Wyoming shots to take the lead. Following a timeout with 49 seconds left, they isolated Terrell Gomez at the top. But his 3-point attempt was long, and they had to sweat out yet another defensive possession.
Marcus Williams fired a contested 3 with Adam Seiko draped on him that was short. Matt Mitchell grabbed the rebound, was fouled and made both free throws with 5.3 seconds left (the second just rolled in) to push the margin to three.
Coach Brian Dutcher called timeout and employed the same strategy he did in a four-point win against Boise State on Feb. 27, fouling before the Cowboys could get up a 3. Williams made the first free throw with 3.4 seconds left, and Wyoming coach Jeff Linder called timeout to implement his late-game tactics: instructing Williams to purposely miss in hopes of getting the offensive rebound.
Williams tried, firing a flat pass at the basket that … bounced off the backboard and rattled in.
It was the first break the Aztecs got all afternoon, or at least it seemed that way.
Mitchell was fouled again and made both free throws. Williams got off an off-balance prayer from halfcourt at the buzzer that didn’t hit anything.
Survive, and advance.
“I like the mental toughness of my team,” Dutcher said. “Happy to be playing tomorrow.”
Gomez led the Aztecs with a season-high 20 points. Jordan Schakel and Trey Pulliam each had 15 on a day when Mitchell, the conference player of the year, had just four for the first 39 minutes, 54 seconds.
“This is March,” Gomez said. “This is what I came here for.”
SDSU shot a respectable 49 percent overall, but Wyoming compensated by making 12 of 25 beyond the arc — many of them with hands in their faces. With 7:38 to go, Williams banked one in over Mitchell.
“If you let a team make 3s on you,” Gomez said, “it’s going to be a close game.”
The Aztecs were ahead 33-32 at the half, which was a bit different from their two regular-season meetings. The halftime score was 63-30 in the first, 51-28 in the second.
Surprising? It shouldn’t have been, given the dynamics of the Mountain West quarterfinals. The top three seeds get the winner of Wednesday play-in games, which means you have a team that hasn’t played in more than a week against one that was on the court in some cases fewer than 24 hours earlier (and has confidence and rhythm coming off a victory).
In its previous six quarterfinals, SDSU struggled in all of them in the opening 20 minutes. Last year’s 30-2 team trailed Air Force 37-33. In 2017, the Aztecs were down 32-14 against UNLV before winning in overtime.
First half of those six quarterfinals: minus-22 points.
Second half of those six quarterfinals: plus-74 points.
Another factor in the closer score was Wyoming’s Xs and Os. A day after a record-setting 111-80 win against San Jose State, Linder put the reins on the Cowboys and had them run 15 seconds off the shot clock before initiating offense. That resulted in numerous lean-in, fall-away, off-balanced, contested jumpers at the shot-clock buzzer.
Another factor: The Cowboys kept making them.
On defense, they were content to let the Aztecs take mid-range jumpers to their heart’s content, banking on the analytics that say it’s statistically the lowest-value shot in basketball. They also dropped way (and we mean waaaaay) off Pulliam, Lamont Butler, Nathan Mensah and Keshad Johnson, daring SDSU’s less-accurate shooters to fire away while double-teaming Mitchell whenever he got the ball in the post.
And all of it worked.
The offensive patience saved the legs of a team that had played 23 hours earlier, and the Aztecs took the bait by having lesser offensive threats shoot while Mitchell attempted only two shots in the opening 29 minutes. The idea was to keep it close late into the game, and then hope either for some magic or an Aztecs implosion out of frustration.
Wyoming got a little of both before running out of miracle shots, making only one basket over the closing five minutes.
