Richie Saunders and Keba Keita spun to look at the referee after a whistle midway through the first half in Boston on Saturday, concern etched on their faces.
They were bracing for the possibility that Saunders would be assessed his third foul with No. 7 BYU down 21-12 to No. 3 UConn. If so, the senior guard would likely ride the bench for the rest of the half.
The ref blamed Keita, but the Cougars barely had time to sigh in relief before Keita left the game for good after taking blow to the head with the score 26-12.
This was the exact nightmare foreseen by many Cougar fans on Tuesday when their team fell behind Delaware by 13 and came back to win. They muttered to each other that a start like against UConn would be a death sentence at TD Garden.
As everyone knows, BYU eventually trailed by 20 and then roared back to have a shot to tie the game in the final seconds, only to lose by two.
That’s a big deal in Provo. The last time a BYU team won a non-conference regular season game over a top-five team was a November 1981 victory over No. 2 UCLA.
Saturday’s game, then, was proof of concept for this group of players. Last year, Kevin Young’s first Cougar team played cream puffs all fall and didn’t gel and develop into the Sweet Sixteen team it would become until February.
Young’s second team just showed, in mid-November, that it has the horses to live up to the hype of being the first team in BYU history to begin a season in the top 10. And the Cougars did it with Keita in the locker room and another starter, guard Kennard Davis Jr., in street clothes on the bench for violating team rules.
They did it by riding the Big Three. Again.
Young kept Saunders, AJ Dybantsa and Robert Wright III on the storied Boston Celtics parquet floor for 18 minutes each in the second half.
They combined to score 40 of BYU’s staggering 52 points in the final 20 minutes.
“Pretty impressive,” Young said, “because that’s a really good defensive team.”
UConn coach Dan Hurley, a notorious stickler who blamed his team’s inability to win a third straight national championship on its defense, actually was happy despite BYU’s late barrage.
Think of it this way. The Cougars ripped off 45 points — 21 of them from Dybantsa — in the final 14:55.
Hurley, who in the past has been prone to tantrums about porous defense, just credited BYU’s talent and made a bold declaration about his Huskies.
“I think the group’s got the potential where the defense won’t hold us back from winning championships this year,” he said.
Of course, BYU did fall short, even though every Cougar fan still would like to see what Wright III might have done if he hadn’t lost his dribble while splitting two defenders toward a wide-open lane to the hoop with 12 seconds left.
So what were the biggest takeaways?
Start better and shoot better early
For one, BYU has to start games better than it did in its two games this last week.
Falling way behind while missing the first 10 3-point attempts in each game is not a formula for success.
That’s a point of emphasis for UConn, said Tarris Reed Jr., who scored 21 points and is on the watch list for the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Award for the nation’s best center.
He said Hurley calls the first four minutes of every game “the first war.”
“Coach is on us every day,” Reed said. “Our practices are so intense. There’s no team in the country that practices the way we practice. I mean, we go to war every single day. So walking into a game like this, we know what to expect, and we gotta be physical from the jump.
“That’s going to be biggest thing for us this year. We need to set the tone early, be dominant.”
This Big Three is already awesome
Second, BYU’s Big Three is legit.
That may not sound like news, but it is in important ways.
Saturday was proof of concept that the way the trio carried the Cougars’ scoring load in earlier games is repeatable against top-five teams.
It’s also evidence that, while Young says he’s still getting to know the full roster, BYU already can work well enough together to get each other the shots they need to thrive within the flow of the offense.
In fact, here’s how many shots each man has taken so far this year:
- Wright, 55.
- Dybantsa, 54.
- Saunders, 53.
They’re all sharpshooters:
- Dybantsa, 57.4%
- Wright, 50.4%
- Saunders, 49.1%
In a state where Utah Jazz star Andrei Kirilenko is still lionized as AK-47 for his initials and jersey number, AJ, Rob and No. 15 Saunders are BYU’s accurate AR-15.
Don’t sleep on Dawson Baker’s sniping from 3-point range. He made 3 of 4 Saturday and is up to 50% for the season.
BYU might be deeper than expected
With Keita and Davis out, unlikely contributors emerged.
Khadim Mboup played 22 minutes and was a team-high +11 (BYU outscored UConn by that much while during his time on the floor). He grabbed six rebounds and a steal, blocked a shot and scored two points while playing tough defense, despite five fouls.
Tyler Mrus played 14 hard, important minutes, Xavion Staton added seven and Dominique Diomande six.
All four are still adjusting to BYU’s style, their roles and the speed of the game at this level.
“It was good to see our guys execute a lot of different coverages,” said Young, who used different diamond zones, traps and pressure. “I thought we got pretty deep into the defensive bag. We were throwing pretty much everything at them.”
Young went to a full-court press to “muck up the game” for UConn. It did that and gave the Cougars a jolt of energy.
That group of bench players, including contributions from Mihailo Bošković despite his shooting struggles, held UConn to 27 points over the final 15 minutes.
That level of D can win a lot of games.
“They’re a really good offensive team,” Young said. “Their offense is very layered. Most teams, you guard one action and then it’s kind of stopped. They do a good job of keeping their kind of thing going. So we wanted to disrupt their rhythm. I thought in order to do that, we had to switch up our defenses.”