Zylan Cheatham nearly record triple-double, Sun Devils test depth in win
As Zylan Cheatham walked down the Wells Fargo Arena, the same word kept coming from his mouth. With each utterance, the agony grew.
“One,” Cheatham yelled. “One. One.”
Mid-way through the second half, someone whispered to the 6-8, 220-pound forward. “Yo, you almost have a triple-double. You’ve got like seven assists,” a teammate told Cheatham.
From there, the race was on.
With just under three minutes left and two dimes shy of the feat, the ASU (6-0) forward held the ball at the top of the key and chucked it up for the soaring Luguentz Dort, who couldn’t finish the slam.
“I’ve been on Lu pretty much since the last buzzer sounded. He missed that last lob. That would have sealed the deal,” Cheatham said. “It happens. You just have to keep playing.”
Cheatham notched 13 points and 12 rebounds and, of course, nine assists in ASU’s 89-71 victory over Nebraska Omaha (3-5). But he sat in the media room after inching so close to becoming the second Sun Devil ever to record a triple-double (the first was Jordan Bachynski in 2012) and struggled to offer any more complaints.
Heck, one of the few negative questions Cheatham fielded Wednesday night turned positive by the end of the Phoenix native’s answer.
“We came out slow start. We reverted back to our old ways for a second,” Cheatham said. “We’ve had a couple games where we came out slow. We haven’t put together two halves yet, and that’s the exciting part of this. We’ve accomplished a lot and we haven’t even scratched the surface of where we’re going to be.”
As they did against Cal-State Fullerton and Utah State, the Sun Devils let Nebraska Omaha hang around. With six and a half minutes left in the first half, the Mavericks, which found success in the paint, led by a pair.
But then, Arizona State went on one of its signature bursts. But unlike last season where the quick influx of scoring came from beyond the arc, the 2018 Sun Devils ignited their explosive offense with great defense.
Forcing Nebraska Omaha into four turnovers down the stretch, the Sun Devils raced to a 21-7 run to finish out the half ... and then added to it with a 16-2 run to start the second half. In about 11 minutes the game was over.
“I thought our stretch from the six-minute mark in the first half to the first seven minutes of the second half was probably as good as any consecutive stretch we’ve played this year,” ASU coach Bobby Hurley said. “The level of defense we were playing through that stretch. The ball was moving really well.”
With a hampered lineup that didn’t include guards Remy Martin and Rob Edwards or forward Mickey Mitchell, Hurley was forced to operate with just eight scholarship players. The offense quickly began flowing through the hands of Cheatham, Luguentz Dort, Kimani Lawrence, and Taeshon Cherry.
(Hurley said that he spent Monday morning in the doctor’s office for several hours while noting that they’re not dealing with long-term injuries but that he wants to “protect my players and make sure they’re 100 percent healthy when they have an opportunity to go.”)
The quartet combined for 69 points and confirmed a notion that Hurley and the Sun Devils mentioned for a while but was a bit untested: The Sun Devils have a lot of go-to scorers. With each new guy coming off the bench in place of an injured player, it’s adding depth.
Perhaps in a few months, Hurley and Co. will look back on this stretch of games against mid-major competition and see it as a catalyst for later success. Come conference season, injuries and slumps likely won’t be such the detriment they were last year. Hurley will have a bevy of players with meaningful minutes logged at his disposal.
“It’s unbelievable,” Cheatham said. “You know how long this season is, especially if you play through March. These seasons can get so long. Players are going to go down, things are going to happen. We’ve got a great group of guys from starter to bench that when stuff like this happens we just patch it up and keep going and figure it out.
“There’s not a lot of teams that have the depth that we have.”
Cherry may have been the biggest beneficiary of all. The freshman, who recorded a then-career-high 15 points against Utah State, notched his first collegiate start on Wednesday and came out firing.
Cherry admitted that until that Utah State game, his confidence was shot. He couldn’t find his stroke and he was trying to be a player that he clearly wasn’t. So Hurley drew up some designed plays for the freshman last week and, voila, his shot came back.
After raving about his past few practices to the media on Monday, Cherry nailed his first three 3-pointers en route to a career-high 19-point night.
“He made some great plays, his defense was solid,” Hurley said of Cherry. “He adds a new dimension to our team of a guy that you can’t leave unaccounted for behind the 3-point line. The way he can shoot it, even the times we got him in the post, that mid-range jump shot is pretty good, too.”
If you count Cherry as the Devils’ leading scorer despite the fact that both he and Dort recorded 19 points, ASU has had four different leading scorers in its last four games. Martin led the way with 15 points against Long Beach State, Lawrence has a career-high 22 points against Mississippi State, Dort finished with 33 against Utah State and then Cherry tonight.
A variety of scoring won’t be an issue for the Sun Devils. But can it all mesh when everyone is healthy?
“They haven’t shown me or given me any reason that they won’t be that way,” Hurley said. “I don’t think we have any straight scorers on this team. Most of the guys we have I think value doing a lot of things well. So by nature, the roster itself is built towards moving the ball and making the right play.”