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PROVO — After a harsh loss to St. Mary’s to open up West Coast Conference play Thursday, the Brigham Young University Cougars took a complete role reversal and greeted their next California opponent, University of San Diego, in the Marriott Center with an 88-52 win Saturday.
BYU guard Charles Abouo commented on the correlation between Thursday’s loss and Saturday’s win.
“You definitely have to forget about those negative emotions you have after a loss like that,” Abouo said. “But you want to make sure that your team uses it as motivation to win the next game. No one likes to lose games and our program here definitely doesn’t like that. So every time we have a loss we use it as motivation to get better.”
After scoring a career-high 28 points against St. Mary’s on Thursday, Brandon Davies used the loss as motivation for a new career-high night on Saturday with 22 rebounds.
“We wanted to make sure that our effort defensively was different,” Davies said. “We kind of got put on our heels with St. Mary’s so we just tried to make sure we were really aggressive this game.”
The scoreboard visually bragged of the Cougars' strong defense. After sinking a jumper around one minute into the game USD suffered a 7:07 scoring drought with Simi Fajemisin finally scoring a foul shot with 11:56 left in the first half.
BYU’s aggressive defense quickly eliminated USD’s top scorers: Johnny Dee (13.2 points per game) scored two points and Chris Manresa ( 11.1 ppg) scored four points.
“Coach had a really good game plan and we really played well together on defense. Our big guys showed on all of the screens, the guards switched when we had to,” Abouo said. “It was a really good team effort and obviously stopping their leading scorer really helped us.”
BYU head coach Dave Rose emphasized that the early defensive team gets the win.
“We were able to get the game in our favor early because defensively we executed the game plan well,” Rose said. “There were very few shots that we didn’t have some effect on, either rushing it or challenging it or maybe changing it. That was the biggest factor in us being able to win the game.”
USD head coach Bill Grier acknowledged the frustratingly strong defensive presence of BYU on his shooters.
“(Our) big guys struggled to get the ball and then when they got it they couldn’t score,” Grier said. “In the first half we defended pretty well but we just couldn’t score. We went through a (seven-minute) drought, and yet as poorly as we played we were only down 10 at the half.”
Grier was grateful for USD’s forward Ken Rancifier coming in and giving the Toreros a lift in the first half, which helped bring USD to as close as a five-point deficit (BYU 20-15). Unfortunately for USD, the somewhat optimistic 10-point difference at the half became bigger and bigger in the second half.
Abouo scored 12 points in the second half. Noah Hartsock and Abouo both finished with 15 points. Davies scored 15 points and eight rebounds in the second half alone, and totaled 22 rebounds and 21 points for the game. It was the first 20-20 game by a BYU player since Mark Handy against Wyoming in 1975.
I have great teammates that were getting me the ball when I had easy looks. I just did my part defensively and I was just fortunate to come away with those numbers.
–Brandon Davies
With 22 boards being such an impressive stat, it would only be fair to also note the unimpressive shooting percentages of the Toreros on Saturday: 23 percent from the field and 18.5 percent from 3-point range.
Davies refuses to take credit for his seemingly ever- increasing talent at the rim — both on offense and defense — and instead points out the abilities of his teammates.
“I was just trying to do my best to execute the game plan,” Davies said. “I have great teammates that were getting me the ball when I had easy looks. I just did my part defensively and I was just fortunate to come away with those numbers.”
With his team leading close to 30 with four minutes left, Rose took Davies out and put in Nick Martineau, who drained a 3-pointer, and Damarcus Harrison, who honored Davies’ vacancy with a dunk.
“(Davies) is just resilient out there,” Abouo said. “His mindset is to help the team win in anyway that he can. He comes out there with a lot of desire and effort in every play and on every possession. He’s been awesome for us and the guys tend to feed off that. When he’s playing that way we’re hard to beat.”
