Matt Weiner (@mattweiner20) – Basketball Beat Reporter
Photo via Titus Wilkinson of The Spear
With both feet planted on Provident Credit Union Event Center’s hardwood, San Jose State head coach Tim Miles swiveled his body and looked up at a site Spartan fans look down upon:
The lack of banners that SJSU has hung.
“We’ve talked about looking at the banners and saying, ‘There’s not very many up there. It could be really special for this team to be up there,’” said Miles.
Finishing a historic season with a proudly hung vestige starts and ends with senior guard Omari Moore. The pressure of leading a March push is both a compliment and a relief.
“The past three years around this time … we are kind of looking forward to the end of the season, kind of over it because we are losing so much,” said Moore, SJSU’s longest tenured player. The Spartans held a combined average winning percentage of .278 by Feb. 9 in his previous three seasons.
With seven games left the eagerness to show up is as foreign to SJSU (14-10, 5-6 MW) as what it is chasing:
First Mountain West conference tournament win and first ever postseason win.
Behind Moore’s 16.7 points per game and 19.9 conference points per game, conference-leading five assists per game, he can help SJSU win two of its next seven games to clinch the first .500 season since 2010-11 when they made a CBI Tournament appearance.
When Miles swiveled his body that was the most recent banner he saw.
A .500 season would be SJSU’s third of the 21st century and puts SJSU in the running to make a postseason tournament while improving its Mountain West tournament seeding.
“It’s definitely an energy shift and definitely a culture change,” said Moore, the fifth-leading scorer in the Mountain West. “We know that we are playing for a bigger purpose.”
Resting in Moore’s wide-reaching palms is the opportunity to be the face of that bigger purpose.
“I think he realizes that and I know he wants it to go well and he’s doing the work to get us there,” said Miles.
This Saturday night, SJSU welcomes Utah State (19-6, 8-4 MW) who’s currently No. 33 in the NET to kick off a five-game gauntlet where they’ll play four of the top 39 teams in the NET. SJSU sits at 110, dropping seven spots after Tuesday’s loss to Fresno State.
A stumbling would be understandable, but still rife with disappointment.
Ironically, a stumble that led to disappointment is the last page Moore left off on when the Spartans and Aggies met in Logan, Utah back on Saturday, Jan. 21.
Tied at 74 with 31 seconds left, Moore began driving to the paint, but slipped at the arc, fell to the ground and watched the ball roll out of bounds, setting up Utah State to take the lead on the next possession on a free throw and win the game 75-74.
He finished with 16 points and eight assists, but scored just six points and was 0-for-2 from three in the second half.
The loss doesn’t entirely fall on Moore’s shoulders, but he could’ve helped seal a monumental upset as Utah State entered at No. 33 in the NET which was 95 spots higher than SJSU at the time.
While SJSU has won two conference games with banal days from Moore — UNLV and Fresno State — for the Spartans to make a March push, the 20-point plus performances he had against Colorado State, Air Force, Wyoming and Santa Clara can’t be few and far between.
After the last-second letdown in Logan, Moore moved on and chucked it out of his memory bank, but now, some of those feelings have trampolined back as fuel for vengeance.
“It’s like, ‘They’re going to feel me this time around,’ I’m going to go give it my all and give them 40 minutes of hell hopefully,” said Moore.
The “40 minutes of hell” from Moore will be needed not just Saturday night, but the six following games and possibly a couple big ones in March.
All to make sure the hopes of leaving a banner doesn’t go up in flames.
“It doesn’t come easily when quite frankly you’ve been at the very bottom of the league forever,” said Miles.
“That’s how legends are born.”