Coming off a heartbreaking loss in San Diego, the Lobos headed to Logan, UT in hopes of sweeping the season series with the Utah State Aggies. Unfortunately, it didn’t go that way, as the Lobos came away with an 80-72 loss. They’ll now look to stop this little skid this Saturday at home against San Jose State. Although the Spartans are currently sitting in last place in the conference, they’ve recently started to show signs of improvement, so that Lobos will need to come out with focus and intensity if they want to put the Spartans away.

Utah State Game Recap

After such a disappointing loss against SDSU, there was certainly a question as to how the Lobos would respond in their next game. The team has had a history of compounding disappointing losses with flat performances in their next game, so the hope was that wouldn’t happen again. For the first part of the game, it seemed like we might be in the clear. Although they allowed the Aggies to get off to a quick start with a few three pointers early, it seemed like the Lobos might have weathered the storm, especially once they took a five-point lead. Unfortunately, that was the high point of the game.

10 minutes into the game, the Lobos were hanging on to a 17-15 lead. That means that their offense wasn’t doing all that well, as that’s on pace to score 68 points, but their defense was doing really well, keeping the Aggies to a 60 point pace. From that point on, the defense faltered, allowing Utah State to score 65 points in the remaining 30 minutes, which would be an 86.7 point pace for a full game. That’s just not going to get it done. I don’t know exactly what happened, as at times it seemed like they were a little out of it, perhaps because of the SDSU loss, and at times they just looked tired, but whatever it was, they just weren’t able to get the stops that we’ve seen them get in previous games.

So, thanks to that increase in offense by the Aggies, or a decrease in defense by the Lobos, the teams went into halftime with Utah State having an 8 point advantage. In the second half, it looked as though the Lobos had learned their lesson, as they came out with a quick 6-0 run to cut the Aggie lead to 2. However, that didn’t last, as the teams basically just traded baskets back and forth for the rest of the game, with the Aggies having a couple of little runs interspersed to give them a decent cushion. Ultimately, Utah State came away with an 80-72 victory and the Lobos had to head home having gone 0-2 on their road trip.

Players of the Game

1. Tim Williams (49 points on the season): Tim had another really strong game, putting up a 21 point, 7 rebound performance while playing all 40 minutes. He got those points on 9-12 shooting, which means he managed to improve upon his excellent free throw percentage, and 4 of those 7 rebounds were on the offensive end of the court. He’s averaging 19 points and 7.7 rebounds per game in Mountain West play and I’d hate to think about what this team would look like without him. In his presser on Thursday, Coach Neal called Tim the best post in the league. I’d have a hard time arguing against that.
2. Elijah Brown (46 points on the season): Elijah got back to having a good shooting night, which was a welcome sight to see, and that added up to a 22 point performance. He chipped in 5 assists compared to only a single turnover to boot. Unfortunately, unlike his past few games, he wasn’t able to get to the line with any regularity, not shooting his first free throws until well into the second half. He’s obviously can still be very effective without getting to the line much, but he’s elite when he does.
3. Sam Logwood (9 points on the season): Sam, as he’s being doing for most of the season, played his butt off once again, fighting for rebounds, playing tough defense, and being active on offense. That effort came with the team’s highest +/- rating on the night, with a +6 (Joe Furstinger was the only other player with a positive +/-, with a +5). Recently, he’s started to attack the rim from the perimeter, now that teams have to close out on him thanks to his solid three-point shooting, which has been good to see. He gets a little caught up down low sometimes when bigger players come over to help, but I think that as time progresses, he’ll start to find the open big down low for some easy assists.

San Jose State Game Preview

This is the second time that we’ve seen San Jose State, the last time being an 83-64 Lobo win in San Jose just a few weeks ago, so most of the preview for that game still holds. However, the Spartans, despite their position at the bottom of the conference standings, are coming in playing their best basketball all season. In the past three games, they beat Air Force and Fresno State at home and then almost (and should have) came away with a win on the road against UNLV. So what changed? In a word: defense.

In their past three games, the Spartans have only allowed their opponents to shoot 30.8% from the field, including 21.4% from three. Really, the main reason that they lost that game against UNLV is that they allowed the Rebels to shoot 32 free throws (which they only made 20) and they missed 12 free throws of their own. If this is a trend that can continue, they won’t be the easy matchup in March that I think most MWC teams were expecting going into this season.

Part of that improvement might be that one of their bench guards, Jalen James, is healthy again. Although he’s not one of their key players, nor does he rate as a particularly good defender, he does give them some depth, which can help everyone on the team. However, another thing that they seem to be employing is a slower pace. That’s something that I think they should have been doing from the outset, as I think it gives them a better chance to win, so maybe they’re having those thoughts too. Either way, it will likely play into the Lobos’ hands for the game to be played at a faster pace, so hopefully the Lobos can speed the Spartans up.

Scattered Thoughts

• I was going to have a section in here about the whole Cullen thing, but instead I wrote a separate article about it. Please check it out, if you haven’t already.
• While SJSU has been on a bit of a defensive hot streak, the Lobos have just gone through their worst stretch of defensive performances all season, based on Sports Reference’s defensive rating metric. In fact, the last time the Lobos had a four game stretch like this on defense, it was when they played Rice and then headed to Hawaii. There are a couple of bright sides to this. First, rather the 0-4 they went in the previous stretch, they came out 2-2 this time, mostly thanks to the fact that they’ve still been doing pretty well on offense. Second, they bounced back last time, having a great stretch of defensive showings immediately after. Hopefully they’ll do that again this time.
• As I’m sure you’re aware, there was another colossal officiating mess-up on Wednesday, when Boise’s James Webb made a deep three pointer to break a tie with CSU at the end of overtime that was called back after review. In the explanation, the officials said that they used the digital stopwatch to determine that it took about 1.2 seconds for him to get the shot off, while there was only 0.8 seconds left on the game clock. Thing is, the digital stopwatch wasn’t calibrated correctly, so it overestimated the amount of time that was used and if you used a working stopwatch, he got it off in about 0.6 seconds. That means the game should have ended with that shot and with a Boise win. Instead, the Broncos were deflated and ended up walking out of the gym with a loss.
  So, that’s two games within a week that the officiating affected that have huge ramifications for the conference regular season title. Let’s pretend that both games didn’t have those big mistakes (for the sake of this, I’ll pretend that the other games played out the same way.) The standings would look like this: 1) SDSU (10-2), 2) UNM (8-3) 3) Boise St. (8-4), 4) Fresno St (7-4). Instead, they look like this: 1) SDSU (11-1), 2) UNM (7-4), 3) Fresno St. (7-4), 4) Boise State (7-5). So instead of there being four teams within two games of first place with 6-7 games to go, SDSU has a 3.5 game lead. Without an epic collapse, they’ll coast to the title, rather than it being interesting and exciting down the stretch. What a bummer.

Prediction

SJSU has been playing better than they were, but I still think that they’re going to be overmatched by the Lobos in what might be an emotional game for the home team. I have a feeling that it will be closer than the last time out, though, so I’ll take the Lobos to win 75-64.

Game Info

Who: UNM Lobos (14-10, 7-4) vs San Jose State Spartans (8-16, 3-9)

Where: WisePies Arena AKA The Pit, Albuquerque, NM

When: Saturday, February 13, 2016 at 4:00pm MT

Radio: 770 KKOB

TV: Root Sports