It didn’t take too long for anyone watching that the San Diego State men’s basketball was going to rout Sacramento State in the opening round of the Wooden Legacy on Thursday night.
Within four minutes, the Aztecs (4-1) scored 12 points while the Hornets (1-4) had six turnovers. By halftime, SDSU was leading 49-14 en route to an 89-52 drubbing of Sac State at Fullerton’s Titan Stadium.
“Sac State I’ve seen them play on tape three or four times and the one thing I know they do is they always play hard no matter what the margin is,” Aztec coach Brian Dutcher said. “We had a big enough margin where they weren’t able to fight back but I thought their physical play, the way they defended was effective tonight against us. We had 20 turnovers, so I thought their physical play took us out of a lot of what we do.”
The game started at 10 p.m. and ended a few minutes after midnight. With the next game in the tournament scheduled for 4 p.m. Friday, it was a relief for Dutcher that the Aztecs were able to build up a large early lead.
“I didn’t have to play my starters major minutes, we play (Friday) at four o’clock, it’s a quick turnaround so hopefully we saved some legs for (Friday’s) game,” he said.
Devin Watson led with 12 points, Trey Kell and Matt Mitchell each had 11 points. Jalen McDaniels had a career-high 13 rebounds with eight points. All 11 players saw action on the night and all scored for the Aztecs.
“They obviously are a good team, they had their ‘A’ game,” Sac State coach Brian Katz said. “We got down and got overwhelmed, we’re certainly better than we played but I don’t ever want to minimize the opposition’s performance, I thought they were really really good. I thought that we got off to a slow start and never really recovered.”
SDSU next faces Georgia in the tournament. The winner of that game will go to the finals on Sunday.
