By Ernie Gonzalez (@superego1012):
San Jose State men’s basketball, who remains winless in conference play is getting set to face a scary Wyoming (13-7, 4-3 MW) team Saturday afternoon inside The Event Center.
Wyoming is coming off its most impressive win all year, knocking the Mountain West’s top dog Nevada of the top-25 radar, who entered Wednesday night’s matchup ranked 23 in the nation.
The Cowboys battled back-and-forth with the Wolf Pack, and sent the game into two overtimes, but hung on in a thriller, 104-103. Wyoming now has beaten the conference’s two best teams as they stand today: Nevada and Boise State.
That same hour of that same night, the Spartans were pummeled 94-71 in Boise, despite shooting the best they have all year (53.8 percent).
In a game where the Spartans allowed more threes to be taken than any other game they’ve ever played, 18 of them went through the nets, also the most SJSU has given up in a game.
Tightly defending the perimeter is a must for this SJSU squad, who relies too much on defense and rebounding and cannot afford to allow opponents to find their rhythm from behind the arc.
Wyoming is putting up 78.8 points per game while the Spartans almost always allow a Mountain West opponent 70 points, while struggling to hit that mark, averaging just 64.7 points per 40 minutes.
The Spartans are a team that prides themselves on winning the rebounding category, and both teams come in averaging about 36 per game.
As for shooters, three-point specialist Noah Baumann has the best three-point percentage in the conference (18-29) at 62 percent. Overall on the season he has hit 31-59 (52.5 percent).
Keeping the topic on the three ball, junior forward Ryan Welage needs one more reach third place on SJSU’s all-time list for three-pointers made. Currently, Welage has 134 and is tied with Rashad Muhammad. Next up on the list is Adrian Oliver with 138.
Already past the halfway point of the season and Welage remains the team’s only player averaging double-digit points (17.7).
The Cowboys have three of them in Justin James (18.1), Hayden Dalton (17.6) and Alan Herndon (12.7).
The ball goes up at 2 p.m.