'Full of disappointment': San Francisco seniors eliminate BYU from WCC Tournament

LAS VEGAS — Good things happen when a team relies on two veteran, savvy guards taking advantage of an extra year of eligibility to come back for the best season in more than 30 years.

Just ask San Francisco.

Khalil Shabazz scored 22 points with five 3-pointers, and fellow senior Jamaree Bouyea added 18 points, six rebounds and four assists to help San Francisco hold off BYU 75-63 in a West Coast Conference Tournament quarterfinal at the Orleans Arena.

Gabe Stefanini added 10 points for the Dons, who held BYU to just 38% shooting, including 3 of 20 from 3-point range.

Rated No. 26 in the NET and No. 22 in KenPom, the Dons (24-8) advanced to face Gonzaga in a WCC semifinal Monday — and all-but guaranteed their spot in the NCAA Tournament with their seventh Quad 1 and Quad 2 win away from home this season.

Fousseyni Traore had 16 points and 12 rebounds, and Alex Barcello added 18 points and three assists for the Cougars, who bowed out of the tournament with fight but also a lot of questions. Spencer Johnson added 11 points and three rebounds, and Te'Jon Lucas had 8 points and three assists while playing 25 minutes — including most of the second half with four fouls.

"Obviously, we're full of disappointment and sadness right now," BYU coach Mark Pope said. "But I thought it was a really hard-fought game and really competitive."

Just three months ago, BYU (22-10) was flying high coming off a nonconference season where the Cougars ranked as high as No. 12 in the Associated Press Top 25. BYU was a consistent top-30 team in the NET and soared up to a No. 6 seed in some NCAA bracket projections.

By March 5, those projections were dead. Barring the ultimate of miracles, the Cougars will miss the NCAA Tournament for the sixth time in seven years.

"Those are incredibly competitive guys who put their whole heart and soul into this," Pope said. "They're guys who have put their whole heart and soul into trying to resurrect themselves after taking some pretty hard hits, and they did an unbelievable job fighting back.

"When you invest that much, it's hard to lose. We knew the opportunity we had in front of us tonight, and they put everything they had into it."

Not even an injury to starting forward Yauhen Massalski, who had 8 points and nine rebounds before hobbling into the locker room and returning on an injured knee in the game's final moments, could seemingly keep the Dons out of their first NCAA Tournament since 1998.

That's why when Julian Rishwain forced a turnover with four seconds left and Bouyea found himself with the ball in the open floor, the senior rose up high over a well-off-in-the-distance Trevin Knell and threw down a hammer dunk that sent the green-and-gold portion of the announced crowd of 1,799 in attendance into a frenzy.

Seconds later, they began booing the officials for whistling Bouyea for a technical foul (unsportsmanlike conduct) for the dunk, and subsequently hanging on the rim.

It may as well have been the best dunk he's ever received, though.

"I think it was kind of personal," said Bouyea, reflecting back to the Dons' 73-58 win over the Cougars in Provo back on Feb. 3, part of a now-infamous four-game losing skid that began to derail BYU's season. "We played at BYU, and they kind of said some things. It was kind of chippy, and the game went a little sideways. That was kind of personal, and so I went for a dunk."

At this, USF coach Todd Golden smiled and laughed as he sat next to his senior, then leaned over his own microphone.

"I might have told him to go dunk it, as well," he joked.

Why not? The fans were chanting "U-S-F! U-S-F!" and hollering at arguably the school's best men's basketball team in the modern era — or at least the one with the most regular-season wins (23) since the program was reinstated in 1985-86.

And Golden, for his part, said there was no bad blood between his program and BYU.

"It was just an exclamation point on a great game; they were still competing," Golden said. "I have a lot of respect for coach Pope and his program; I think he's a great coach, and I love the guys on his staff.

"There's no bad blood; it's two really good programs competing at a really high level. They're going to compete for all 40 minutes of the game."

If there was any exception taken — some unwritten rule or lack of sportsmanship or decorum — Pope likewise didn't publicly take any with the play.

"Two teams are playing as hard as they can, and they won," he said. "I don't really have any comment (beyond that). If we don't want that to happen, we should win the game. We've got to play well enough to win."

BYU held San Francisco scoreless for 4:51 in the first half to build up a 17-14 lead midway through the opening half. But the Dons responded with a 13-2 run of their own, highlighted by a pair of 3-pointers from Bouyea, to take a 27-19 lead with just 3:59 remaining.

But Traore capped the Cougars' late scoring run with an and-one dunk of his own, and BYU finished the half on a 5-0 spurt — limiting USF to just one field goal in the final 5:28 — to trail just 27-24 at the break.

It felt, in many ways, like a battle between two NCAA Tournament teams — even if it likely wasn't.

"Credit to them, they played really well," said Johnson, who has played at the highest levels of high school, junior college and Division I basketball in his career. "When we played UCLA last year, you saw the run that they played — and playing high-level teams is always a battle. They came out, they hit some shots, and it didn't go our way tonight.

"But I totally think that we're a tournament team and we have the guys and the resume. I'm really just super proud of the guys and how they competed. We'll bounce back; we always do, and we always will."

Any thought of a comeback, though, were extinguished midway through the second half.

That's when Shabazz capped an 11-0 run to put the Dons up 54-39 with 9:14 to play after San Francisco held the Cougars — who were limited by four fouls on Lucas and three on Barcello — scoreless for nearly three minutes.

"This was a big game for a multitude of reasons," Golden said. "The media had been building this up as an elimination game, and I didn't feel that way with our body of work. But tonight, we left no doubt.

"These two guys next to me are, to me, the best two guards in the league. … Jamaree and Khalil have played together for almost three years. It's just a blessing for us, I'm really proud of our group, and I'm just excited for my group to go dancing."

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