With March just around the corner, BYU basketball has to take care of business now or it will have a long road ahead in the conference tournament.
The men sit sixth in the West Coast Conference with a 6-7 record (16-12 overall) after losing over the weekend at Gonzaga. The BYU women are fourth at 8-6 (13-12).
Every team in the conference qualifies for the tournament. The important thing is seeding. For the uninitiated, the higher a team is in the conference, the later it gets to play in the conference tournament. That allows for the best teams to play fewer games, thus giving them a better (and easier) chance of winning it.
For instance, if a team finishes first or second in the conference, they don’t play until the semifinal round of the tournament. So if you’re Saint Mary’s, which is atop the men’s side right now, and the season ended today, you’d only have to win two games to win the conference title. But if you’re BYU, that journey would start in the second round and you’d need to win four games.
The same applies to the women.
Both BYU teams have their work cut out for them down the stretch of their respective schedules. The men have to play three teams they’ve already lost to earlier in the season: Santa Clara, No. 17 Saint Mary’s and San Francisco. Two of those games are at the Marriott Center, so that should help, theoretically.
The women have games against the top two teams in the conference (Gonzaga and Portland) and two teams that frankly aren’t that good (Santa Clara and San Francisco). They lost to both Gonzaga and Portland at the top of the season, and got upset by Santa Clara six games ago. The upside there is BYU is a much more cohesive team than the one that saw Gonzaga and Portland in mid-December.
On paper, the women should finish with a winning record in the WCC. They’re one game behind San Diego in the standings, but they don’t really need to finish ahead of the Toreros. The third- and fourth-place teams start WCC Tournament play on the same day. But if they can find their way to third, they’ll have a more favorable matchup in the tournament.
It’s the men who have to worry. We’ve said in this space that they need to finish with a winning WCC record in order to for them to have a successful season after how much they’ve struggled. For that to happen, they need to win the rest of their games. That’s unlikely given who they’re playing.
Sixth is not a terrible spot for the men to be in to start the WCC Tournament. They’ve already proved they can compete with any team in the conference. But they can’t afford to drop any further than that. Even falling to seventh means they play on the first day of the tournament (March 2) and have the longest road to reach the championship game.
It’s still possible, though, that BYU finishes as high as third. There’s a logjam in spots 3-8 in the conference. If things go their way, the men could find themselves in a great position to make a run to the semifinals or even the finals.
KenPom/NET Ranking
Men
KenPom: 81.
NET: 88.
Women
NET: 105.
Most Eye-Popping Stat
400-400 Club. Lauren Gustin on Saturday reached numbers no other college basketball player — man or woman — has this year, and that’s amass 400 points and 400 rebounds in a single season. She did it by getting 21 points and 16 rebounds against Loyola Marymount, putting her totals in the respective categories at 409 and 411 so far.
“That’s incredible,” coach Amber Whiting said of the accolade. “The fact that I get to coach that every day is amazing. Her stats, they speak for themselves. But I just love her as an individual person. The stats mean something, yes. ... She cares about the little things, and she cares about winning as a team. So that speaks highly of her.”
Only two other BYU women are in 400-400 club for a single season. They are Tina Gunn Robison and Jennifer Hamson.
Quote of the Week
“Usually I would say, like, OK, I’ll get a dunk in when I get a layup opportunity. That time, it just happened. Did not think of it. I’ll get the next one for sure.” — Rose Bubakar, when asked if she thought of dunking the ball on a fast-break layup.
Bubukar gets plenty of minutes for the women’s team. She can play as a small-ball 4 or a bigger wing player who can take her defender off the dribble and create a shot.
And at 6-foot-3, she has a skill not many women’s players do: She can dunk.
The scuttlebutt around the team is that she dunks in practice often. But it has yet to come out in a game. Late in the win against LMU, she got a go-ahead pass where the only thing in front of her was the basket. Although, she did have a Lions defender close behind.
Players and personnel on the bench where clamoring for Bubukar to dunk the ball in that moment, but she could only get off a layup. She did slap the backboard, though, indicating that she actually does have the hops to dunk in a game.
Time will tell if fans get to see it this season.
Schedule Lookahead
Men
Thursday, vs. Santa Clara
Saturday, at No. 15 St. Mary’s
Feb. 25, vs. San Francisco
Women
Thursday, at Santa Clara
Saturday, at San Francisco
Feb. 23, vs. Portland
Feb, 25, vs. Gonzaga
