MANHATTAN, Kansas — BYU basketball coach Kevin Young massively upgraded his nonconference schedule in his second season in Provo, and the Cougars responded with 12 wins and only one loss, by two points to No. 3 UConn in Boston.
Along the way, they beat the likes of Villanova, Wisconsin, Miami, Dayton and Clemson and piled up five Quad 1 or Quad 2 wins.
But one thing the No. 10 Cougars did not do in November or December was play a true road game on an opponent’s home floor. Not since a 90-89 exhibition loss at Nebraska on Oct. 18 has BYU faced the kind of hostile crowd that it will face Saturday when Big 12 play begins.
The Cougars, who have won eight-straight Big 12 regular-season games, second only to Houston’s 10, open league play here at Bramlage Coliseum against the rebuilt-but-dangerous Kansas State Wildcats (9-4) at 11:30 a.m. MST in a game that will be televised nationally by CBS.
“It is a high-powered offensive team,” Young said Thursday after a practice in Provo. “They have a really good scorer in (P.J.) Haggerty. And (Abdi) Bashir is one of the best shooters in the country, along with a few other guys on their roster. So we have to pay them the respect that they deserve as a 3-point shooting team. … Haggerty is a one-man wrecking crew in and of himself.”
Indeed, the matchup features two of the top three scorers in the country, as BYU’s AJ Dybantsa is second in the country with a 23.1 average and Haggerty, who has also played at TCU, Tulsa and Memphis, comes in with a 22.9 average. Duke freshman Cameron Boozer is No. 1 at 23.5 points per game.
“We’ve been really impressed on tape with a few of their other players as well. They’re not just a one-man band,” Young said. “There are some other guys that can really hurt you off the dribble as well.”
BYU lost 84-74 to K-State the last time it visited Bramlage, when Mark Pope was the Cougars’ coach. Last year, the Cougars walloped the Cats 80-65 in Provo.
The all-time series is tied, 5-5.
The Cougars’ early conference schedule is fairly easy, by Big 12 standards, but BYU will have a big target on its back, due to the presence of Dybantsa and its top-10 national ranking. The Cougars have won four-straight road games dating back to last year, tied for the fifth-longest streak in the country.
Also, a win would give BYU its first 10-game winning streak since it won 10 straight in the 2010-11 season when Jimmer Fredette was a senior.
The Cougars could be a bit rusty — they haven’t played since outpacing Eastern Washington 109-81 on Dec. 22 — while the Wildcats tuned up for the conference opener with a 94-85 win over Louisiana-Monroe at home last Sunday.
Young described the health of his team as “pretty good, for the most part” and said a flu bug that swept through the squad and his own family over the holidays is pretty much gone. Of bigger concern is the team’s conditioning level, and the fact that it won’t have played for 12 days.
“Some of the continuity that was being built up, you put a pause on that, and that’s going to take a little bit of time to sort of regain,” he said.
Three of BYU’s five starters — Richie Saunders, Keba Keita and Robert Wright III — have played in the Big 12 before and know what it will be like to play a league game in front of a hostile road crowd. Saunders has moved up to No. 26 on BYU’s career points list with 1,335 and can pass Marty Haws (1,337) and former BYU teammate Fousseyni Traore (1,338) with a couple of buckets in Manhattan.
To combat the rust, Young said the Cougars have scrimmaged a bit more than they usually do the past few practices since the team reconvened after Christmas.
“It impacted our preparation today a little bit,” Young said. “We probably played a lot more and did less Kansas State-specific things than we would have maybe if it was a normal type deal where we weren’t coming off of a break. … We felt very strongly that our guys needed to play as much as they could.”
If a shootout breaks out, as expected, the Cougars will need another big game from Southern Illinois transfer Kennard Davis, who had five 3-pointers en route to 17 points in the win over EWU.
That game also marked the debut of 6-foot-10 center Abdullah Ahmed, the sophomore who spent two seasons in the NBA G League with the Westchester (N.Y.) Knicks. Ahmed had five rebounds, blocked a shot and made a free throw against the Eagles.
Young said the addition of Ahmed and the losses of Dawson Baker and Nate Pickens to season-ending injuries has impacted his rotations a bit.
“I feel great about our starting five,” he said. “We’ve had a couple of different guys come off the bench and help us. … When you add somebody new midseason that still takes time to flesh itself out.”
Young also spoke at length Thursday about the hot topic in college basketball right now, which is how professional players from the G League and from overseas are joining college teams. Baylor recently added former NBA draft pick James Nnaji, drawing criticism from Michigan State coach Tom Izzo, Arkansas coach John Calipari, and others.
“In the big picture, everyone is trying to figure it out, like, ‘Hey, what are the rules, and how can we play within those rules?’” Young said. “So I think that’s what Baylor did, and kudos to them for figuring that out. You have to do it, or you’re going to kind of be playing catch-up.”
