By Matt Weiner (@mattweiner20) – Basketball Beat Reporter
Photo via Titus Wilkinson of The Spear
Ask any scout attending a Pasadena High School game in 2017-18 if they came to watch Bryce Hamilton or Omari Moore. They’ll likely say the former – the four-star averaging 20-plus points.
Ask again which will win the Mountain West Player of the Year. They’d offer back-handed dismay.
‘Hamilton, the guy going to UNLV and not Moore, the guys with no stars or offers.’
They’ll be shocked to see five years later it was Moore – a facilitating fourth or fifth scoring option – who secured the Mountain West’s highest honor.
Back then, no scout expected Moore to be the face of a historically significant, unheralded rebuild. SJSU’s gone from five straight seasons with single-digit wins to a first round bye in the Mountain West Tournament and the best chance at ending the program’s post-season drought.
While Hamilton was an All-Mountain West First Team at UNLV before becoming a member of the G-League’s South Bay Lakers in 2022, it was expected. He entered his senior year of high school with offers from Ohio State, Arizona State and Nevada.
But Moore however had no offers entering his senior year. Or when it ended – at any level. His first came in July from SJSU which makes his rise to Mountain West Player of the Year even more unfathomable.
Those taking in the PHS blowouts led by Hamilton and Darrius Brown, who committed to New Mexico, would be shocked to hear that Moore is now garnering serious draft interest from NBA teams. If drafted, he’d be the first Spartan since Brandon Clarke in 2017 and third since 1988.
Fast-forwarding closer to present-times, it was unexpected for him to even be a Spartan.
After suffering a combined winning percentage of .177 under Jean Prioleau in his first two seasons, Moore exploded, leading SJSU in points (13.2), rebounds (5.5), assists (4.6), steals (1.1) and second in blocks (1.1). But it all came in an 8-23, one conference win season with first year head coach Tim Miles at the helm.
But he trusted Miles’ track record of flipping and rebuilding programs at all levels of college basketball.
There was a high chance Moore would enter the transfer portal and parlay it into a high-major offer. He contemplated it, too, after having his confidence boosted by NBA scouts during a pre-draft workout with the Lakers.
He’d already suffered two dreadful losing seasons under Jean Prioleau and was weary of doing the ‘best player on a team, going nowhere’ song and dance.
Entering the season Miles, now a 2022-23 Mountain West Coach of the Year, gave Moore a challenge:
“Where he jumped from, from the season before we got him to where we got him last year which is 13 and 5 basically a game. I want that same jump. So what does that look like? 18 and 6.5 something like that right,” said Miles.
That jump was accomplished and Moore accepted and is currently excelling at another challenge:
Lead a March push.
“The past three years around this time,” Moore said back on Feb. 9, “we are kind of looking forward to the end of the season, kind of over it because we are losing so much.” The Spartans held a combined average winning percentage of .278 by Feb. 9 in his previous three seasons.
He’s since done that thrusting SJSU to a 6-3 record since Feb. while taking on five 20-plus points performances and helping lift to two upsets over the top four Mountain West teams in Boise State and Utah State, where he went for 27 points, 19 of which came in the second half.
And his final regular season concluded with a career-high 33-point performance and a a game-saving chase down block to end SJSU’s miracle season with a miraculous 20-point second half comeback over Air Force.
“It doesn’t come easily when quite frankly you’ve been at the very bottom of the league forever,” said Miles back on Feb. 9. “That’s how legends are born.”
Moore’s season and rise has felt more legend than legendary. A tall-tale told to high school recruits who’re ready to accept that basketball will turn from lifestyle to hobby. What’s more an objection to the notion that the transfer portal has wiped away loyalty in college basketball.
“I think about it all the time: What if San Jose hadn’t offered me a scholarship?” Moore said, pausing to consider the possibilities. “Would I have had to walk on somewhere? Would I even be playing basketball still?” Moore recently told the SF Chronicle.
Instead, after receiving his offer from SJSU in July, he went to Middlebrooks prep in Los Angeles and came to SJSU in 2019after putting muscle on his lanky frame.
Moore credits his incredible limb-bending layup packages and craftiness around the rim to his time spent as an under-sized guard.
Before he had physicality, he had finesse. Now that he has the former and more of the later, it’s made him the fourth-leading scorer in the Mountain West.
Heading into the Mountain West Tournament, Moore is seventh all-time in career points (1,247), fifth in assists (407) and fourth in blocks (88).
Postseason glory is the only thing missing from the SJSU legend’s legacy.
Yet.