SALT LAKE CITY — Last week was a perfect snapshot of what the Utah basketball team personifies this year.
On Wednesday night, the Utes played brilliantly in knocking off one of college basketball’s blue-blood teams, taking a 69-66 victory over Kentucky. On that night, the Utes looked like they could play with anyone in the country.
Then just three days later, the Utes looked more like an NAIA team, trailing from the get-go and getting trounced by San Diego State, losing by 28 points, 80-52.
It’s been like that all season for the Utes, who’ve been pronounced as the second-youngest team in America with 11 freshmen, four sophomores and a junior-college transfer.
The Utes looked great in victories over Kentucky, Nevada, Minnesota and BYU and lousy in losses to San Diego State, Coastal Carolina and Tulane. There hasn’t been a lot of in between.
Now the Utes have their longest in-season break in 65 years with no games during the Christmas holidays and the next game coming on Jan. 2 against Oregon State at the Huntsman Center.
The Utes are going 11 days between games, the longest in-season break since 1954-55 when the Utes went 14 days between a Dec. 22 game in Kentucky until a league game at Denver on Jan. 6.
Players were allowed to go home for Christmas and will get back together the day after Christmas to begin preparing for Pac-12 play.
“We can kind of decompress with our families wherever we are and come back and a few of the injuries and bruises can get healed up and we’ll get ready for a real challenging Pac-12 schedule.
Being 9-3 at the end of non-conference play is probably better than anyone expected from this Ute squad, which returned just four players from last year and had 12 new players including junior-college transfer Alfonso Plummer coming in this season.
Sophomore forward Timmy Allen has far and away been the team’s best player, leading the team in scoring in every game and being the leading rebounder in eight of the 12 games. He was named Pac-12 Player of the Week for the second time in three weeks.
For the season, Allen is averaging 21.0 points and 7.4 rebounds, while shooting 53.3 percent from the field and 78.2 percent from the free throw line. He leads the Pac-12 Conference in scoring and ranks 19th in the nation.
The other two returning starters, Riley Battin and Both Gach have been solid on the whole, but have seen their ups and downs. Freshman guard Rylan Jones has battled injuries to both his ankles as well as his ribs, yet had been a key player on both ends of the floor, directing the offense and playing good defense. Other frontcourt players, freshmen Branden Carlson, Lahat Thioune and Mikael Jantunen, have had their moments for the Utes.
“Three big words in our facility are play hard, play smart and play together,” said Krystkowiak. “When we’ve done that, play hard and share the ball and do things collectively, we’re pretty darn good and in instances when we don’t there’s a correlation with us losing some games.”
UTE NOTES: The Utes were picked for ninth in the Pac-12 this season but after playing all of their non-conference games, they find themselves ranked seventh among the Pac-12 schools in the latest NET rankings . . . The Utes have fallen from No. 54 in the NET rankings to No. 65, which puts them behind Stanford (12), Oregon (14), Arizona (19), Washington (27), Colorado (28) and Arizona State (54). Others in the league are USC (75), Oregon State (79), Washington State (126), UCLA (161) and Cal (165) . . . San Diego State is ranked No. 1 in the nation in the latest NET rankings. Among other opponents, Minnesota is 29th, BYU 34th, Kentucky 74th and Nevada 95th . . . Jones is fourth in the Pac-12 in free throw percentage at 87.1 percent and fifth in assists at 5.0 apg.