RENO, Nev. — This team.
Three days after blowing a 24-point lead and winning in triple overtime, San Diego State’s bipolar basketball team unveiled its latest trick: going down 14-2 Tuesday at the Lawlor Events Center … and coming back to beat Nevada 73-68 and remain atop the Mountain West.
That improves the Aztecs (10-4) to 4-0 in the Mountain West, tied with Utah State, heading into a Saturday home game against 1-3 Fresno State.
And the team so maligned all season might, possibly, see a faint light at the end of the tunnel.
It wasn’t their prettiest win of the season. It might have been their gutsiest, though.
Nevada erased a six-point deficit in the second half and took a 66-65 lead as the game lurched into its final, dramatic minutes.
The Aztecs went ahead by a point when Reese Dixon-Waters followed his own miss inside and had a chance to make it three off a BJ Davis steal kicked ahead to Miles Byrd. But Byrd missed the layup amid heavy contact as coach Brian Dutcher screamed: “That’s a foul, that’s a foul.”
Davis, though, got another steal, and the Aztecs ran the clock down before the 6-foot-2 guard drove into traffic and chucked up a desperation left-handed heave as the shot clock neared zero.
The hero? Miles Heide, who grabbed the rebound, scored before the shot clock expired and was fouled.
He missed the free throw, but the Wolf Pack had a 3 go in-and-out at the other end. Davis was fouled and made both free throws, making it 71-66 with 17 seconds left.
Freshman Elzie Harrington added a pair of clutch free throws with 9.3 seconds left, his only points of the night in his first college game at elevation.
San Diego State’s Miles Byrd dunks during the first half of Tuesday’s game against the University of Nevada in Reno, Nev. (University of Nevada athletics)
After shortening the bench late in regulation and 15 minutes of overtimes Saturday against Boise State, Dutcher had used his full 11-man rotation five minutes into the game in the rarefied air of Reno and got a balanced performance from pretty much everyone.
Byrd led with 14 points, but Dixon-Waters, Davis, Heide and Taj DeGourville all had 10 each.
If you figured the momentous triple-overtime win against Boise State three days earlier would give this bipolar team a lift, you’d be wrong.
It didn’t.
Score after five minutes: 14-2, Wolf Pack.
The Aztecs got a layup from Heide on their second possession to knot it at 2-2, then went turnover, miss, turnover, turnover, turnover while Nevada went fast-break dunk, fast-break layup, 3-pointer, 3-pointer, jumper.
Dutcher likes to save his timeouts in case he needs them late in a close game, regularly letting his team work through issues early in the game. Not Tuesday night. He called one with 16:08 left in the half, one of the earliest of his career, not waiting for the under-16 media stoppage.
They finally found some rhythm midway through the half and erupted for a 10-0 run that forced Dutcher’s counterpart, Steve Alford, to call timeout.
By halftime, the Wolf Pack lead was down to two.
By the opening possession of the second half, the Aztecs had their first lead after a 3 by Byrd.
They would build the margin to six but no more, and Nevada chipped away at the line, in one key stretch scoring 10 of 13 points on free throws.
Notable
Next up: Home against Fresno State on Saturday (8 p.m., CBS Sports Network). It is the teams’ only regular-season meeting, with SDSU skipping the trip to the Save Mart Center in the Mountain West’s unbalanced schedule.
• The return game against Nevada at Viejas Arena is Feb. 14.
• In attendance at the Lawlor Events Center: Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez, who lives in the Lake Tahoe area, though the conference is headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colo.
• The Mountain West got another lowly rated crew from the Big Ten officiating consortium that services the conference: Alfred Smith, Jim Bruno and Ian Caldwell. None is in the top 100 of the Kenpom ref rankings. Smith and Bruno usually work low-level Midwest leagues, and Caldwell is a former Big West official who has never been in the Kenpom top 200 in his 13-year career.
• The halftime entertainment was the Red Panda, the Chinese acrobat who flips bowls onto her head while riding a tall unicycle.