The Thursday night practice round for the grand return of Formula One racing to Sin City lasted all of eight minutes, until a manhole cover on The Strip backstretch of the 3.9-mile circuit loosened and caused severe damage to the underside of a $15 million race car.
A couple blocks away inside T-Mobile Arena on Friday night, there were no such obstacles for San Diego State.
The Aztecs out-toughed, out-shot and eventually out-everythinged Saint Mary’s 79-54 in the opening round of the Continental Tire Main Event in a battle of teams ranked in the Associated Press preseason Top 25.
In Sunday night’s 7 p.m. final on ESPN2, they’ll get the winner of the late game between Xavier and Washington.
The Gaels were picked to win the WCC ahead of Gonzaga, and last week they beat New Mexico by 14 at home. But if they studied SDSU and its affinity for Sin City, they would have known they were in trouble.
The Aztecs have a preposterously good record at the Thomas & Mack Center, where they annually play UNLV and the Mountain West tournament. And in nonconference events held elsewhere in Las Vegas, they are now 6-1.
On Tuesday against Long Beach State, they produced a 47-point first half against a team that on Friday won 94-86 at Michigan. On Friday, it was their second half — shooting nearly 60 percent and blitzing the Gaels 45-21.
And to think: The Gaels led by six late in the first half.
“That’s what we do,” Jaedon LeDee said. “We’re going to wear you down until you can’t go anymore.”
LeDee had his obligatory 25 points and eight rebounds for SDSU (3-1). According to one statistian, he comes only the second Division I player in the last decade to score 20-plus in his first four games while shooting at least 55 percent. The other: Dayton’s Obi Toppin, when he won the Wooden Award as the nation’s top college player in 2020.
But it wasn’t just LeDee. Reese Waters had 19 points on 7 of 9 shooting. Micah Parrish had 11 points, five rebounds and four assists. Even the Aztecs beleaguered (and still injured) bench outscored its counterparts for the first time this season, 12-11.
“We’ve got a lot of guys who can put the ball in the hole,” LeDee said. “We also can get out and run. Dutch says that every team wants to run each year but not everyone does it. We’re going to hold him to that. We’re going to keep running.”
The Gaels (2-2) shot 34.4 percent and were outrebounded 40-33.
“Once we got down seven or eight, we didn’t compete very well at either end,” said Saint Mary’s coach Randy Bennett, whose team lost at home against Weber State on Sunday. “We better figure out where our toughness level is real quick. We’ve had two back-to-back bad second halves.”
Miles Byrd played after missing the last two games with a hip issue, but 6-foot-10 sophomore Demarshay Johnson Jr. was still sidelined after dislocating his shoulder late in the Nov. 6 opener against Cal State Fullerton.
And that meant one less big against one of the bigger, stronger, beefier, thicker teams on SDSU’s schedule.
The decision for Brian Dutcher and his staff was whether to double-team Saint Mary’s bigs in the low post or play them straight up. They opted for the latter, only occasionally sending a second defender if the big put the ball on the floor.
It was a calculated move. The risk in the double-team is that the Gaels rotate the ball to the open shooter as well as anyone in the country, and that means taking away 2s for 3s.
The results were predictable in the first half: The Gaels made only three 3s (in 11 attempts), but 6-10, 242-pound Mitchell Saxen and 6-8, 220-pound Joshua Jefferson had their way inside. They combined for 22 points on 10 of 16 shooting. The rest of the team had 11 points on 4 of 17 shooting.
The Gaels built a six-point lead, but an 11-4 run gave the Aztecs a 34-33 lead at intermission. How? The Aztecs shot a lower percentage and attempted nine fewer shots, but they compensated by getting to the line 18 times – 15 more than SMC.
The solution?
Get their bigs in foul trouble.
Saxen got his second and third early in the second half. He went to the bench with 18:12 left and the score tied at 38. When he returned 4½ minutes later, the Aztecs led 49-41 and the rout was on. In the second half, Saxen and Jefferson combined to score two baskets.
“We say: If we can get three stops in a row, we can build some momentum,” Dutcher said. “We were able to get a couple stretches where we got multiple stops and then we built our lead. We played well offensively. But the key is getting stops. You can’t just trade baskets.”
Notable
Xavier and Washington were scheduled to tip off about 9 p.m. — or midnight for Xavier fans back in Cincinnati … The Saint Mary’s roster includes Chris Howell, a 6-6 redshirt sophomore from Torrey Pines High School who had one points and two assists in 14 minutes … This is the second of — yes — five Mountain West teams on the Gaels’ nonconference schedule. They beat New Mexico 72-58 at home on Nov. 9. Next month, they play Boise State (Dec. 1), Colorado State (Dec. 9) and UNLV (Dec. 16) … Saint Mary’s WCC opener is Jan. 4 at USD.
