The Sun Devils have lost only three games at home, dropping their first contest at Desert Financial Arena to UCLA on January 17th. Yet, as they went through a stretch of five consecutive losses, their home floor was no longer their fortress. Trying to build on their recent road victory at Utah, and with four out of their next five contests taking place in Tempe, Arizona State is hoping to exhibit the same level of performance as they did for most of the season. Oregon State will be the first test to see if the Sun Devils are ready to turn the page and get back on the home win track.
“Putting our last two home losses consecutively behind us, I think that’s where it’s got to start,” said head coach Bobby Hurley. “We talked about trying to take care of business at home, and we haven’t done it the last two times. So, it’s a priority to be ready to play tomorrow. And there’s no reason that we should be looking past Oregon State, the way they handled us at their place. So they should have our full attention even though, obviously, we have the Arizona game coming up as well.”
And the Sun Devils are entering Wednesday’s contest with some momentum on their side as they finally rid themselves of that aforementioned skid and engineered a familiar second-half deficit comeback, the 44th such victory under Hurley, beating a Utah team that a week ago today was still undefeated at home, 85-77.
“We desperately needed to play that way,” Hurley remarked. “We have to bottle it and try and replicate it as many times as we can move it forward. It was a very good balance on offense. We had quality possessions that were probably the best that we played against the zone, with our movement changing sides of the floor. So I’m encouraged that we’re starting to play better against that defense because we didn’t earlier, especially in on the Oregon swing.
“It was a great bounce back based on just how things have gone in the last couple of weeks.”
As he was battling to gain eligibility in his first year in Tempe, LSU transfer and junior guard Adam Miller was the most anticipated addition to the Sun Devils. By and large, he has not been disappointed with his play, averaging just over 11 points in the 15 contests in which he saw action. And in Salt Lake City last Saturday night, Miller proved that even coming off the bench for the first time at ASU, he was still instrumental in his team’s performance. Miller scored 16 points, shooting 7-11 from the field, 2-4 from three-point range, as well as grabbing three rebounds and tallying two steals. Hurley applauded Miller, who, in an unfamiliar role, was still able to make his presence known in a much-needed win.
“Adam is a pro, the way he handled coming off the bench,” Hurley stated, “he’s going to start tomorrow. So, it is going to be somewhat of a revolving door of sacrifice. Because with certain rotations that I need to have on the floor with certain player combinations, it was necessary for Adam to come off the bench in the last game. He provided a real spark when you have a player of his abilities coming off the bench,
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Junior point guard Frankie Collins has not only been consistently in the top 5 national leaders in steals this season but is also just five steals away from surpassing Sun Devil great Lafayette “Fat” Lever for ASU’s single-season record, which stands at 76. Collins admitted that this feat has been on his mind.
“I’m pretty close; I know where I’m at,” Collins said. “I’m not out there chasing it, though. I’m just playing. But I mean, four steals shouldn’t be hard to get, considering the season, and I’m going after five steals. I’ve had eight in a game (this season). That’s crazy. There have only been several players who have gone over 100. That now might be some good company.
“If I can get 100, that’s huge. I saw Jason Kidd was up there. He got 100, and Gary Payton did, too. Those guys were ball hawks, guarded the position well, and they ran their team. And they were winners. That’s good company to be a part of if I can get that, hopefully.”
Collins is humble enough to put his personal success in perspective, although he’s more than happy to donate $20 for every steal to his hometown Sacramento’s elementary schools. Ultimately, though, he’s as eager as any of his teammates to get back to the level of collective success that ASU exhibited when they started Pac-12 play with a 4-0 mark.
“With the season I’ve had, I just think sometimes it’s about winning,” Collins explained. Even my individual stats or whatever improvements that I’ve made, I think, it’s more so about winning. So sometimes I just be like, ‘Ah, it (personal success) doesn’t matter.’ But sometimes you got to also look and praise yourself and just give thanks to the people around. You give thanks to the man above and just realize how blessed, at the end of the day, we are. We wake up every day, and we can be able to do what we do.”
And when it comes to recapturing that success, Collins knows that watching the film of his team’s 84-71 loss to Oregon State just a couple of weeks ago had to provide plenty of motivation not only to learn from the mistakes the Sun Devils committed but also not to forget what the Beavers exhibited that night.
“If you watched the tape on Oregon State, they had way too much fun when they played us,” Collins described. “They were smiling. They were laughing, they were hyped. When teams play us, they shouldn’t have fun. Because we should be a team that’s playing hard and making things hard for the other team. So, just going out there, playing hard and playing with desperation…I think that’d make a team want to play them again so that that doesn’t happen. So when you look around in the film room, and while we’re watching that, you can see that in the guys’ faces.”
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Arizona State is just about to enter the home stretch of their regular season. Their last home game of the year, a match-up with in-state rival Arizona, will take place in just two weeks, and this Sun Devil squad knows that their only hope of trying to reach the NCAA tournament for the second year in a row will be winning the Pac-12 tournament, which begins in four weeks. As motivated as they are to finish conference play on the same high note that they started that slate, Hurley realizes the importance of not losing focus on the here and now.
“When you start getting down to this time of year, you want to teach yourself not to lose or find a way to win,” Hurley explained. “And the more games that you can win, down the stretch, the tougher it’s going to be to lose when you’re playing for your season. So, that’s been my messaging to the team before Utah: can we go to a place like this against an NCAA tournament team and deliver a performance that is going to be necessary to win and advance in the Pac 12 tournament? There’ll be a team that has something to say about who wins or loses that tournament, and Utah’s a very good team. So I think particularly where we are in our season, to be able to circle the wagons and win that game, I think was huge for our confidence.
“So we got to make sure we’re ready to play from the jump. We’ve had too many times where we haven’t gotten off to the start we need to get off to. But this time of year, you are just thinking about the postseason, trying to compete for a championship, and trying to play the best basketball you can. That’s the goal.
“We just got to play with a lot of passion, a lot of activity on defense, get after it and just be aggressive. I thought that in our first game versus Oregon State they were they were the aggressor. They were quicker to the ball, they got 50-50s, They got offensive rebounds. We were not able to effectively guard them, so we have to see a better performance setting to tone on that end of the floor. The Utah game showed that we have the guys who are capable of being playmakers and that they all have to trust that they need each other. The game is so much easier when you have more guys playing well on the offensive end. And it’s harder for different defenses to deal with us if we have multiple guys playing well on the floor, and then it makes our defense better.”
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