Grand Canyon Faces Crucial Road Test at San José State
After suffering consecutive losses for the first time this season, Grand Canyon head coach Bryce Drew met with his players individually for their input about righting the ship over the regular season’s crucial seven-game finishing stretch.
That is the last time it can be an individual approach for the Lopes, who annually rely on a stifling team defense to win and need deeper production entering a road swing that starts Saturday at San José State at 3 p.m. (Phoenix time) and continues Tuesday at San Diego State.
GCU (15-9, 8-5 Mountain West) took a hit on its first-place chase last week, when it slipped to fifth place in the conference standings. That puts the Lopes in a precarious position to earn one of four Mountain West Championship first-round byes as they try to sweep San José State (6-18, 1-12 MW).
With a GCU win and a Nevada loss at San Diego State on Saturday, the Lopes and Wolf Pack would be tied with Nevada holding the head-to-head tiebreaker.
“There is a lot of season left,” Drew said. “When you’re in a good conference, it’s very hard not to have ups and downs. There’s just too many good teams. You can beat anybody in the league, and you can lose to anybody in the league when you’re in a top-six conference in the country. You have to be mentally strong. You have to overcome adversity. You have to be ready for your next game and not look in the past.”
GCU is 14-0 this season in games it leads at halftime but has found itself facing double-digit halftime deficits in the past two games. The Lopes nearly pulled off a miraculous comeback late at UNLV and did rally from a 20-point hole Tuesday against New Mexico to lead before losing.
The Lopes are 2-3 since losing junior guard Caleb Shaw to an ankle injury, and graduate guard Brian Moore Jr. Also was out hurt for the Jan. 27 loss at Nevada. In their past three losses, the starters have logged 87% of GCU’s playing time.
“We were in a great rhythm when the two starters went out,” Drew said. “We haven’t started games in that segment as well. We need to be able to get off to good starts and sustain that energy throughout.
“Last game, the starters were in such a good rhythm, and we were fighting to come back. They looked fine out there. They kept climbing and getting the score closer. I didn’t want to break their rhythm because they were in such a good rhythm, but it is a lot of minutes. Hopefully, You can do better with that.”
GCU senior guard Jaden Henley and graduate power forward Nana Owusu-Anane are playing career-high minutes, with Henley having the highest usage rate in the Mountain West (28.9%).
Owusu-Anane played all but 56 seconds of Tuesday’s loss to New Mexico and has logged 38 or more minutes in five of the past six games.
“Conference play is the most important time of the year,” Owusu-Anane said. “It’s what we’ve been working for all year. I’m someone who hates coming out of the game. If it’s 10 seconds sitting out, I’m on the bench all fidgety. We get so many media breaks, so I’ll be fine regardless. My personality is so amped that any second I’m not out there, I’m like ‘argh.’ “
Owusu-Anane tied a season low for scoring (two points) on Tuesday, when he grabbed a team-high 10 rebounds. He was 0 for 5 on 3-pointers. Henley has been 1 for 9 on 3s over the past two games. Junior guard Makaih Williams, who played all but 1:33 of Tuesday’s game, went 1 for 9 on 3s.
The Lopes rank 19th nationally for defensive efficiency, according to kenpom.com, but some of that work has been negated by their 3-point shooting. GCU has the 13th-lowest 3-point percentage in the nation at 30.1%, the lowest clip of its Division I era.
“We’ve got to do better coming out,” Owusu-Anane said. “The past two or three games, we weren’t at our best to start games. That’s on us as starters. We can’t let that happen, especially on our home court. For us to come out in front of our home fans in a game of that magnitude and do that is unacceptable. We have to be better, and we assure our fans and our supporters we will be. We can’t have our fans standing that long for us to first score our first bucket. That’s on us, and it won’t happen again.”
San José State is on a seven-game losing streak but the last two defeats came by single-digit margins at UNLV and at Colorado State. The Spartans used a 6-foot-6 and under starting lineup in each game. They have been heavily marred by injuries with their backcourt reduced to three guards.
However, one of the active Spartans is junior Colby Garland, the Mountain West’s second leading scorer at 18.6 points per game. Garland and fellow starter Jermaine Washington (11.9 points per game) did not play in the 76-58 loss at GCU on Jan. 10 but are projected to start Saturday after Washington also missed the past three games for an ankle injury.
San José State’s leading scorer from the first meeting, guard Ben Roseborough (23 points), has been out seven games for a knee injury. The Spartans have been playing all season with JaVaughn Hannah (calf) and have missed senior big man Yaphet Moundi (foot) for the past 11 games.
“We’re going to have to stay out of foul trouble and do a great job of getting back, getting ready and getting organized against those guys,” San José State head coach Tim Miles said at his Wednesday media availability.
The Spartans have the Mountain West’s lowest field goal percentage (42.3%) and highest opponent field goal percentage (48.6%), with the latter being the ninth-highest opponent clip in the nation. They do take care of the ball, committing only 10.9 turnovers per game.
GCU will be going for Drew’s 300th coaching win Saturday, but he is more concerned about how to get the Lopes back to the level that looked like it could make a run at a fourth consecutive NCAA Tournament berth.
“We’ve got to get back to playing basketball how we did three weeks ago, when we were playing at a high level for 40 minutes,” Drew said. “We’re a different team than we were a couple weeks ago, and we have to make that different team be better than what it has been the last couple games.”
