SDSU falls to Arizona in Maui final

A big game against Arizona. Again.

A close loss against Arizona. Again.

San Diego State keeps reading this script, and its suggested edits never seem to make it in each new draft. The ending is always the same; only the setting changes. This time, it was 61-59 against the No. 3-ranked Wildcats in the final of the Maui Invitational at the cozy Lahaina Civic Center.

Last March, it was the Sweet 16 at the cavernous Honda Center in Anaheim. Last fall, it was a regular-season game in raucous Viejas Arena. Two years ago, it was the final of the Diamond Head Classic in Honolulu in a half-empty arena, where what appeared to be a game-winning layup by Chase Tapley was erased at the buzzer by Arizona’s Nick Johnson (and his 43-inch vertical leap).

“All of them are pretty similar,” said SDSU junior Winston Shepard, who is now 0-4 against Arizona. “I feel we should have at least won three out of the last four, in my opinion. But they’re a great team. We don’t take moral victories.”

The Wildcats teased No. 15 SDSU again, leading 57-51 inside 20 seconds to go when Aztecs freshman Trey Kell hit a fallaway 3-pointer and was fouled. He converted the free throw to make it a two-point game, but Arizona’s Stanley Johnson and T.J. McConnell each made two free throws to push the margin back to five.

Then Shepard drained a 3 with .9 seconds left, and Arizona coach Sean Miller was forced to call timeout when his team couldn’t inbound the ball. He diagrammed a play to throw deep to Rondae Hollis-Jefferson, and the Aztecs had lost their fourth straight to the Wildcats and 11th of the last 13.

It was everything you’ve come to expect from Aztecs-Wildcats in this, their ninth meeting in as many seasons (and third in just over 12 months). Low scoring. Physical man-to-man defense. Grind-it-out offense. Foul trouble. Seven ties. Thirteen lead changes. Neither team able to separate from the other.

“The respect that we have for San Diego State can’t be any greater,” Miller said. “We have some great, great games, important games, (tournament) championship or in the NCAA Tournament. But believe me, although we’ve won a few in a row here, each of those games could have gone to their side. Tonight was no different.”

The Aztecs (5-1) held the nation’s No. 3 team to 36.5-percent shooting. Hard to fault that.

But their offense failed them down the stretch, running out of ideas in the halfcourt and resorting to the screen-and-roll basketball of last season minus the key ingredient, point guard Xavier Thames. Other than the desperation 3s from Kell and Shepard in the closing seconds, the Aztecs managed just one basket over the final nine minutes – a 15-foot jumper by Kell with 3½ minutes left.

They shot 52.6 percent in the first half and – partly due to dead legs from three games in three days, partly due to Arizona’s vaunted defense – slumped to 37.9 percent in the second (11 of 29).

“If we could roll back the clock and know what I know now,” SDSU coach Steve Fisher said, “we as coaches would probably have tried to do some other things before we ended up in a pick and roll. So we’re growing, as is every team that came here is, and we’ll be better served because of it.”

Another problem: the old bugaboo, free throws. SDSU was 13 of 24 (54.2 percent), including a pair of crucial misses by Skylar Spencer down four with 1:47 left.

“San Diego State had a bad night from the free throw line,” said Miller, whose team also went to the line 24 times but made 20. “They needed to make their free throws tonight. If they did, we might have lost. As coaches, we’ve all been there. In games like this, you need everything. Their free-throwing shooting certainly hurt them.”

Kell and Shepard led SDSU with 14 points apiece and were both named to the all-tournament team. But JJ O’Brien didn’t shoot in the first half, Dwayne Polee II had just one point in the second half, and their two bigs – Spencer and Arizona transfer Angelo Chol – had a single rebound between them in 36 combined minutes even though Arizona 7-footer Kaleb Tarczewski was on the bench in foul trouble much of the night.

Johnson, a freshman playing his sixth college game, was named the Maui MVP after an 18-point, nine-rebound, three-steal performance in 37 minutes. He didn’t make a basket in the second half but didn’t need to. He was 9 of 10 from the line.

“He’ll make a pretty good NBA player in about six months,” Fisher said. “I saw him in high school a lot of times. We were early on involved in recruiting him. He’s no surprise.”

SDSU led 29-24 on Malik Pope’s deep 3-pointer just 27 seconds after he subbed in, but Arizona surged for a 32-31 advantage at the break. Back and forth it went, neither team leading by more than three points for the first 15 minutes of the second half until the Wildcats went up four, 53-49 on Hollis-Jefferson’s third breakaway dunk of the half.

That came a few minutes after what Fisher called “a critical little stretch there”: three turnovers in four possessions, two by Dakarai Allen trying to inbound to Kell in the backcourt that consumed exactly one second on the scoreboard clock. One second, two turnovers.

In all, the Aztecs had 14 miscues that Arizona converted into 22 points. That’s just two turnovers above their season average. It just seemed like more because so many were of the unforced variety. Twice, passes simply went through a player’s hand out of bounds. Once, down four with 40 seconds left, Shepard pitched it ahead on the break to Polee, who wasn’t looking for the ball and bobbled it to the Wildcats.

“When you come and win two games, you want to win the third one,” said Fisher, whose team will stay in Maui for Thanksgiving and doesn’t play again until Dec. 4 at home against USD. “So we’re very disappointed that we’re taking home the second-place trophy. And yet, we grew as a basketball team. I know when we go back and look and think and talk about things that were very costly to us in this game, we’ll be better as we move forward in our season. I told our team, other than the score I could not be more proud of our effort, our toughness.

“We made mistakes, but so did they. We will learn from them, and hopefully the next time we’re in this type of an environment with an elite team, we’ll find a way to make two or three more plays or not make two or three of the plays that we did.”

Notes

The loss ended SDSU’s streaks of 16 straight regular-season wins with 24 hours or less between games, and 15 straight regular-season wins in the nonconference ... Arizona has now won 33 straight regular-season nonconference games, the longest active streak in the nation ... It was the first time all season SDSU’s bench was outscored, 21-16 ... The Aztecs had the best field-goal percentage (.500) and best defensive field-goal percentage (.377) in the eight-team tournament. The but: They also had the worst 3-point shooting percentage (.340) and worst free-throw percentage (.636) ... It was the fifth straight SDSU-Arizona game decided by single digits ... Not one of Spencer’s better stat lines: 19 minutes, one point, 1 of 4 free throws, no rebounds, one block. Chol, the junior transfer playing against his former team, had five points, one rebound and three turnovers in 17 minutes.