Aztecs get their swagger back, rout Oregon at Players Era Festival

LAS VEGAS – Maybe Michigan is just that good.

For all the hand wringing and soul searching after a 40-point thumping by the Wolverines on Monday night in the opener of the Players Era Festival, maybe the best therapy for San Diego State’s basketball team came Tuesday night as it walked onto the Michelob Ultra Arena floor and looked up at the scoreboard from the previous game:

Michigan 102, No. 21-ranked Auburn 72.

The Aztecs were tangling with Ducks instead of Wolverines. How hard could this be?

And it wasn’t, building a 24-point lead in the second half and riding it to a 97-80 win against Oregon that saved their Thanksgiving and, perhaps, their season.

Oregon, which lost to Auburn by 11 on Monday, isn’t at the level of many other teams here in Las Vegas and isn’t the sort of win that by itself will secure an at-large berth in the NCAA Tournament. But it gave the Aztecs something that had gone missing in consecutive losses against Troy and Michigan:

They got their swagger back.

“I told our guys, they’re got a lot of tradition and they’ve played really well,” Ducks coach Dana Altman said. “We knew they could bounce back. We knew they’d be ready to go. We’d beaten them here a year ago (at the Players Era Festival). They wanted payback.

“They played their tails off. They had a lot more energy than we did.”

The defense still needs work. But the multi-faceted, lethally-efficient offense that they envisioned for this season magically came to life, with 67.2% shooting – the highest in 13 seasons – and big games from Reese Dixon-Waters (22 points) and BJ Davis (21).

Or maybe it was the red uniforms, which they wore for only the sixth time in the nine-year Brian Dutcher era. They’re now 6-0 in them.

What it all means in the big picture remains to be seen. It’s a long season. In the short term, it means the Aztecs (3-2) won’t have to hang around Las Vegas for a dreary Thanksgiving afternoon game for the four bottom dwellers in the 18-team event.

Instead, they’ll play Wednesday night Michelob Ultra Arena (7:30 p.m., truTV) against 4-1 Baylor, which beat Creighton and lost to St. John’s.

One team they won’t have to play is No. 7 Michigan, which advanced to Wednesday’s championship game against No. 10 Gonzaga after wiping the floor with SDSU and Auburn, programs that had reached the Final Four in the last three seasons, by a combined 70 points. (Insert gasp here.)

“That’s a really good team,” Auburn coach Steven Pearl said. “Sometimes you run into a buzzsaw. … Yeah, they’re good. When they make 14 3s, I think they beat anyone in college basketball. I really believe that. When they shoot the ball like that, at that rate, nobody is beating that team.”

The Aztecs slinked into the post-game interview room at Mandalay Bay’s Michelob Ultra Arena late Monday night after their most lopsided loss in 27 seasons and said all the right things, how there wasn’t time to fret, wasn’t time to pout, wasn’t time to feel sorry for themselves, wasn’t time to analyze the last game because they had to play another against a Big Ten opponent in 22 hours.

It sounded like lip service at the time, the sort of thing you say because you don’t know what else to.

Twenty-two hours later, it felt remarkably genuine.

Their response? How about a 51-point first half after scoring 54 total Monday? How about shooting 67.2% after 27.4%? How about 1.448 points per possession a night after .730, or double the offensive efficiency?

“When Reese is making shots, and BJ is making them, and Elzie (Harrington) comes in and he’s making them, and (Miles) Heide is 4 for 4, the rim looks the size of the ocean,” Dutcher said. “Everything you throw up there, you think is going in.”

Added Altman: “We gave them some easy baskets to get them going, and then that basket just got bigger and bigger for them. They made us pay.”

After the two teams combined for eight turnovers in the opening three minutes, one of them suddenly snapped out of the funk. The Aztecs scored on 10 of their next 12 possessions, the first 13 points in the run coming from six different players.

Dutcher said, with so little time between games, there was nothing “major” he could tweak to magically fix his team. And he didn’t, sending the same starters on the floor for the opening tip.

The one minor tweak, though, was that he didn’t wait as long to insert Harrington at point guard for the struggling Taj DeGourville, sending him in ahead of Sean Newman Jr. just 4:21 into the game. The true freshman had an instant impact, finishing with 12 points and four assists in 20 minutes. (DeGourville had no points and four assists in 16 minutes.)

Then Dixon-Waters heated up after managing just five points on 1 of 7 shooting against Michigan, twice draining contested 3s late in the shot clock. He had 10 points by halftime, followed by SDSU’s first three baskets of the second half.

“I think a lot of it is just my confidence,” said Dixon-Waters, who shot 9 of 13 overall and 4 of 7 beyond the arc. “Obviously we have a game plan for different defenses we play against, but for somebody like me my confidence is everything. Yesterday I didn’t have that great of game offensively, but I just had to bounce back and play as if that game yesterday didn’t happen.”

Davis was 6 of 7 overall and 3 of 4 beyond the arc, and his plus-18 points in his 21 minutes on the floor was best on the team. He also started the second half for DeGourville for defensive purposes, the coaching staff reasoning he was a better matchup for Oregon guard Jackson Shelstad (21 points).

Harrington: 5 of 6.

Heide: 4 of 4.

Magoon Gwath: 6 of 8.Pharaoh Compton: 3 of 3.

It didn’t help that Oregon 7-foot center Nate Bittle landed on an ankle after scoring 11 first-half points, tried to continue and couldn’t.

“He’s a big part of what we do,” Altman said. “But we didn’t guard when he was in there (either). Defensively, you’re just not going to win games when a team shoots 67% and scores 97 points and outrebounds you by eight. That’s not a formula in anybody’s book to win a game.”

For the Aztecs, it’s on to Baylor and then home for Thanksgiving.

“Any coach here is going, ‘I don’t want to be one of the teams that goes 0-3,’” Dutcher said. “Because there is going to be a really good basketball team here that goes 0-3. Now we get the first win and we’ll try to go 2-1, like we did last year in this event. It gives us an opportunity.”

Notable

Oregon had a five-point play in the first half and four-point play in the second. Both came when Oregon made corner 3s and the Aztecs fouled a Duck player fighting for the rebound while the ball was in the air. That gave the Ducks the three points and the ball … The last time SDSU shot better was 68.2% against Wyoming on Feb. 19, 2013. It was only the fourth time in the 26-year Mountain West era that they have shot at least 67.2% … The Aztecs had seven dunks and 22 assists …

A year ago, the Ducks had an 18-4 edge in second-chance points off offensive rebounds. Tuesday night: 10-9, Oregon … One of the best parts about two lopsided games is managing minutes knowing there could be a third game in as many days. No one played more than Dixon-Waters’ 27½ minutes. Most played 20 or less … Gwath finished with 13 points, six rebounds, two steals and four blocks in 22 minutes. He had only one turnover after coughing up five against Michigan.