Aztecs hope ‘Christmas reset’ leads to Mountain West wins

The Mountain West season resumes for the San Diego State men’s basketball team on Tuesday night at San Jose State.

It can’t come soon enough.

This is a grumpy, pouty, dreary team right now.

“It’s the late-December, early-January grind,” coach Brian Dutcher said after a two-hour practice Sunday in which his Aztecs fluctuated between average and awesome. “It doesn’t look like they’re having a lot of fun right now. They’re working, but there’s not a lot of joy they’re playing with. I want them to play with a little more joy and happiness, and I don’t know what I can do to get that out of them.

“Hopefully, playing games will help. We’ve got to compete more, and maybe that will turn the tide of our season.”

Dutcher divides the season into thirds: nonconference play, conference play and March.

The Aztecs (7-4) completed the nonconference portion of their season with a 121-59 win against Division III Whittier on Dec. 22 at Viejas Arena. There was one Mountain West game in there – an 81-58 win against Air Force on Dec. 17 – but the remaining 19 conference games begin Tuesday, with a regular diet of two per week until a bye in February.

Routine, they hope, will spawn rhythm.

“Honestly, just a whole new season,” fourth-year guard Miles Byrd said. “Obviously, there are some games we lost in nonconference that I don’t think we should have lost. There were some games that were closer than they should have been.

“But that’s the Christmas reset. You come back from Christmas break, and it’s basically a whole new year. If we go take care of business in the next 20 games, nothing in the first 10 really matters.”

SDSU was a rare unanimous favorite in the preseason Mountain West media poll, receiving all 26 first-place votes. It also claimed five of a possible 13 individual honors: Byrd as preseason player of the year, Elzie Harrington as preseason freshman of the year, and Byrd, Magoon Gwath and Reese Dixon-Waters among the 10 preseason all-conference selections.

The results and accompanying metrics suggest the Aztecs aren’t quite such prohibitive favorites, if they’re indeed favorites at all. Utah State (10-1) has a better Kenpom ranking (30th to 52nd). Utah State, Boise State, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado State and Wyoming all are higher in the NCAA’s NET metric. Five have fewer losses.

“There definitely are some Mountain West teams that have been playing very good basketball up to this point,” Byrd said. “But for us, if we take care of what we’re supposed to take care of – and that’s practice, off the court, all that stuff – I think we’re the best team in the Mountain West and it’s not close.

“Which I should say, because I’m on this team. I still have that opinion about us. But I still think we have to do some stuff to get to where we want to be.”

Dutcher looks at it like this:

“You’re usually picked to win the league if you have the most returning players, and we have the most returning players (eight). But in this era of (the) transfer portal, you can bring in six or seven guys and piece a team together. The preseason poll, even though they’re nice for fans to look at, they’re probably not as relevant as they used to be when you looked at returning players and freshmen.

“In this day and age, with all these new players, you don’t know what it’s going to be until you’re out on the floor.”

The Aztecs have played by far the most challenging nonconference schedule, one of only two teams nationally (Auburn is the other) to tangle with both No. 1 Arizona and No. 2 Michigan. Utah State, by comparison, faced no power conference opponents and went 9-1; SDSU faced four and lost three.

The idea was twofold: to build a resume worthy of at-large consideration for the NCAA Tournament, and sharpen themselves against steel instead of rubber.

They didn’t accomplish the first part. We’ll find out about the second part starting Tuesday.

Even with four losses, the Aztecs enter a monthlong stretch where the Kenpom metric predicts wins in eight of the next nine games. And the lone projected loss is by a point at Nevada.

The flip side is that six of the projected wins are by seven points or fewer, meaning they’ll have to win close games. They’ve been in only one game that tight all season and they lost it, 108-107 against Troy in double overtime at home on Nov. 18.

The other wild card is the road. Tuesday at the Provident Credit Union Event Center is the Aztecs’ first true road game of the season, although they did play in front of a partisan Arizona crowd in a supposedly neutral-court event in Phoenix (and were outscored 40-18 in the second half).

And San Jose State has hardly been a gimme. Two years ago, they needed a last-second block by Jay Pal to prevail 81-78. Last year, they needed to overcome enormous deficits to escape with three-point wins, trailing by 21 at Viejas Arena and 17 in San Jose.

“We know what those types of games are,” Byrd said.

On Saturday, they return home to host Boise State, a team that has had more success in Viejas Arena than anyone else in recent years.

It’s a fair question: Does the conference title still go through San Diego?

“We have to believe that, until it doesn’t,” Dutcher said. “We have to believe that, or we shouldn’t be playing. … We’re 1-0 right now and we’re in first place, so we have to find a way to keep winning games.”

San Diego State (7-4, 1-0) at San Jose State (5-7, 0-1)

When: 7 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Provident Credit Union Event Center, San Jose

TV: CBS Sports Network

Radio: 760 AM