New coach, same result; Aggies railroad Fresno, 72-53

High five bro, we're 1-and-0!

To Fresno's credit, they looked like a real basketball team at times tonight. They actually passed to each other, set screens, ran plays and all that other stuff Steve Cleveland never taught them to do. The only problem is that they don't have much talent to work with.


Even Kevin Olekaibe, the WAC's leading scorer going into tonight, hit a wall against the USU defense (we'll call his wall Medlin... that's a fitting name, right?). Olekaibe shot just 4-of-14 from the field, scoring 11 points, all of them coming in the first half. Outside of one assist, he didn't register any other statistics, which really is kind of a head-scratcher for a guy who logged 32 minutes, but whatever.

Checking in from the "news that is really easy to believe" department was another great all-around game from Preston Medlin. On top of locking down the WAC's top scorer defensively, Pre-Med dropped a team-high 19 points on 6-of-9 shooting (3-of-5 from 3-point land), three rebounds, three assists and one steal.

Oh, and he had a dunk, which was pretty awesome, but still left him four behind Kyisean Reed on the night. Reed broke the 13-point barrier, that once seemed unbreakable, for the second time in three games. When you throw down five dunks, it's easy to shoot 87.5 percent for the game like he did. Blocking three shots and pulling down 10 rebounds is a nice way to complement 16 points too.

Still, the game wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. A few of the 12 turnovers in this game were pretty bad, and while Fresno has been very good this year at limiting turnovers, you've gotta hope that USU could have mustered out more than seven from them (eight counting that one out of bounds where the Fresno guy took two dribbles, lost control with nobody around him, and they still gave the ball back to Fresno).

At the end of the day though, 1-0 is 1-0, and it was a convincing win despite some sloppy play at times and a cold streak or two throughout the game. At the rate this team is improving, it's not crazy to expect any little holes to be patched by Saturday. That's the first big game of the young WAC season, and where Fresno had just one star that USU really needed to worry about, Nevada has four stars that could take over a game on any given night.


NOTES

• Seven assists and only one turnover for Brockeith Pane? Yes please! The 3-of-8 shooting is a wash at worst if Pane is going to be dishing assists like that. He's now averaging 4.6 assists per game over the last six games... not too shabby at all
• E.J. Farris, believe it or not, has outscored Pane in three of the last six games. I'm not sure I ever thought I'd see the day where he became a solid, reliable option off the bench, but that day looks to be here.
• Tyler Newbold, ERRR... Danny Berger, while not exactly on a scoring tear by any means in the last few games, now has 27 assists to only eight turnovers on the season. In the last six games, 23 assists, only TWO turnovers!! Newbold-esque doesn't even do that justice.
• Solid showing by Mitch Bruneel tonight. Adam Thoseby gets only garbage minutes. Solid minutes off the bench from those two are much-needed for the rest of the year. Really hoping Thoseby can work his way back into more regular minutes and really hoping Bruneel can give a solid 15 minutes each game.
• Morgan Grim is averaging 12.8 points and 9.8 rebounds per game on 63.8 percent shooting over the last four games. It rarely looks pretty, but haters gonna hate. Call his game anything you want, as long as you don't call it unproductive.
• Currently there are four players averaging double-figures in scoring. The last time that happened was 2001. Didn't something else major happen for the last time back then too??

Player of the Game: Kyisean Reed