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Utah's Larry Krystkowiak will forever be the college basketball coach everybody associated with BYU despises, but when it comes to the WCC coaches, San Francisco's Rex Walters was the hands-down winner for that title.
Unfortunately, Walters is now coaching the Grand Rapids Drive of the NBA's Developmental League, having been fired by USF last spring and former Saint Mary's assistant Kyle Smith will be roaming the sidelines for the Dons tonight when they visit BYU at the Marriott Center (7 p.m., BYUtv) for a 7 p.m. Thursday league game.
The Dons are 11-6 overall and have lost three straight and four of their last five after a strong start. However, their last two losses were to Gonzaga (95-80) and Saint Mary's (63-52).
Still, it is USF's best 17-game start since the 2004-05 team was 13-4 at the same juncture. It is a dangerous team, as Utah learned in Hawaii last month when the Dons went 16 of 28 from 3-point range in an 89-86 win.
It is almost two different teams; The starters are disciplined, run sets and play more like Saint Mary's in terms of their half-court play. The bench players, led by leading scorer Ronnie Boyce, play more loosely offensively and have the potential to go off on any opponent.
"Their bench has outscored their opponents' bench by a couple hundred points in maybe the last eight or nine, 10 games," BYU coach Dave Rose said Wednesday. "So it is a really disciplined group that starts. Their offensive system reminds me a lot of Princeton's and their defensive system you see a lot of Saint Mary's. When that bench comes in, it seems like there is a lot more freedom."
A senior, Boyce is averaging 16.0 points per game while averaging just 22.5 minutes per game.
"Ronnie Boyce is probably as good of an offensive player as there is in the league," Rose said. "So that's an issue. But I think the biggest thing defensively to start the game by is not let them get started shooting threes and making threes.
It is a team that one time was No. 3 or No. 4 in the country in making threes per game. I still think they are up there pretty good. They made 16 threes against the Utes. And that's just something that we are really going to have to defend, and we have had some games where the teams have really shot well from the three-point line against us."
Freshman guard Charles Minlend is shooting 43 percent from 3-point range (31 of 71) and Jordan Ratinho is shooting 45 percent from long range (28 of 62).
"Well, they all can shoot them. Like the first game of the year when we faced Princeton, a lot of what they do is to get you sucked in and get everybody spaced and then find those guys who can shoot it," Rose said. "it is not like it is one or two guys you can't help off of, or you kind of scout and don't let a couple guys get going. It is a whole group of guys from the five that start to the five that come off the bench."
Sophomore guard/wing Elijah Bryant played well in Saturday's big win over Pacific, going 5 of 7 from the field for 17 points, but Rose doesn't plan on any starting lineup changes against the Dons.
"We will start the same way tomorrow," Rose said. "But eventually there could be [changes]. We will see. We just need to play some games and see how it all fits. I think there will be lineups in the game that will be different. Obviously we need to find good combinations of the right guys. It is a tough time to be doing that, right in the middle of league play, but we will look forward to the challenge."
Junior forward Jamal Aytes was sick last week and missed both games, but should be available tonight.
"He has practiced all week, which is good," Rose said. "But he gets winded pretty quick. I mean, he had a full six days, where four of those days he didn't get out of bed. Two of those days he was here at practice, but didn't practice. So hopefully he can give us minutes, but it will probably be short stints at a time."