While other college basketball teams are off to places like the Bahamas, Puerto Rico and Orlando, ASU is venturing north to colder weather.
With high temperatures expected to be in the twenties all weekend, the Sun Devils head to Anchorage, Alaska to participate in the Great Alaska Shootout.
ASU senior guard and Arizona native Ty Abbott admitted that he didn’t own any gear for that kind of cold, so he had to make a shopping trip for some new clothes.
“I Googled the weather maybe two weeks ago and it said it was 18 degrees,” Abbott said. “I’m looking forward to it.”
The four-day tournament gets underway on Wednesday with two first-round games, but ASU’s opener in the tournament doesn’t come until Thursday against Houston Baptist.
Because the Sun Devils don’t open until Thursday, regardless of the outcome of their games, they will play three games in three days.
“You have to be able to handle whatever happens and quickly put it aside because the next game is on you right away,” ASU coach Herb Sendek said. “The longer you have between games, the more time you have to put things in your proper place. When you have three consecutive games, it requires, the good, the bad, the ugly, whatever happens to be quickly reset on an individual basis and on a team basis."
The field at this year’s Great Alaska Shootout is down from year’s past. ASU joins St. John’s as the only two major conference schools in the field.
HBU, the Sun Devils’ first opponent, has been a member of the NCAA for just three years now, after competing in the NAIA.
The Huskies are 0-3 on the season, falling to Oklahoma State, Northwestern State and Texas-Arlington.
If ASU wins Thursday, it will face the winner of the Weber State (1-2) and Alaska-Anchorage (1-2) matchup on Friday. If the Sun Devils lose, they will face the loser.
UAA’s leading scorer is former ASU forward Taylor Rhode, who is averaging 15 points per game for the Seawolves.
The other side of the bracket starts on Wednesday and features Southern Utah (1-2) taking on former ASU assistant coach Mark Phelps’ Drake squad (1-1) and Ball State (2-1) squaring off with St. John’s (1-1).
The seventh-place, fourth-place, third-place and championship games will be held on Saturday.
With lesser-known opponents comes a bit of unfamiliarity with the smaller conference teams. Sendek is mainly focused on preparing his team to be the best they can be for the tournament.
“I always focus most on Arizona State,” Sendek said. “We’ll do our scouting; we’ll go through the other team’s personnel and their tendencies. But right now, the most important team we have to focus on is Arizona State.”
Thus far, Sendek has been pleased with the progress his team has made in just one week of game action.
“I really think we have made great progress with the framework of our offense,” Sendek said. “The conceptualization of our offense, guys are starting to see things better. We have really made a lot of progress with that.”
Two areas that have a lot of room for improvement are rebounding and three-point shooting.
“We have to pick up our rebounding, that is one thing that is killing us,” Abbott said. “They have got a lot of second chance points.”
It hasn’t helped that sophomore center Ruslan Pateev has not been able to stay on the floor due to early foul troubles.
“He has to work hard to avoid that in the future,” Sendek said. “In fairness to Ruslan, he didn’t play much at all last season. In all intensive purposes, he is another freshman.”
As far as the shooting is concerned, Sendek isn’t concerned due to a small sample size.
“I’m not at all concerned about that,” Sendek said. “We are getting really good shots and we have good shooters. If we were getting bad shots and had bad shooters, then I’d be more concerned. I think we are getting pretty good looks at the basket, in some cases we couldn’t get better looks if we were the only team on the court.”
Abbott thinks that part of the early season shooting woes might have something to do with learning to play without Derek Glasser on the floor.
“The shots aren’t the same as we got last year,” Abbott said. “When you lose a guy like Derek, who finds so many guys that are wide open and creates so much for everybody, it is going to come with time.”
Injury Update
Abbott is confident that he will play on Thursday, after injuring his knee during the UAB game.
“It kind of feels like a charley horse, but right on the knee,” he said. “I hit it pretty hard twice, it is going to take some time to loosen up. I was hoping it would feel better than it did. I have to go get some treatment and see what’s going on.”
Junior guard Brandon Dunson has been cleared to return to action after missing the first two games with a very unusual injury.
“Believe it or not, he hurt his shoulder and arm, sleeping,” Sendek said. “We’ve never had a guy get hurt sleeping before, but honestly he couldn’t lift his arm up above his shoulder.”
Reach the reporter at andrew.gruman@asu.edu
