Strong guard play propelled New Mexico in its first two games. A dominant post presence secured the third.
Pick your poison, says New Mexico head coach Craig Neal.
“I'm not going to go back to every press conference that I've had this year, but I've said we've got a lot of weapons,” Neal reiterated during Thursday’s press conference before Saturday’s road game at Southern California.
So far in this early basketball campaign, the Lobos (3-0) have shown they can score points in different ways. They’ve had three different leading scorers in their three games so far -- guard Cullen Neal against Texas Southern, guard Elijah Brown against New Mexico State and, most recently, forward Tim Williams against Loyola-Chicago.
With Cullen Neal’s 22-point effort in the opener and Brown’s 31-point performance two days later, Loyola-Chicago put pressure on those two players in Wednesday night’s showdown. That essentially freed up Williams, forward Sam Logwood and center Obij Aget. Twenty-two of UNM’s 75 points came inside the paint in that game, including a few alley-oop dunks.
Aget in particular controlled the paint against the Ramblers because apparently he could see better. Neal said Aget had been having difficulty for three or four weeks with catching the ball either off passes or for rebounds, and the coach wondered if it had to do with his eyesight.
Neal said Aget had his eyes examined on Tuesday and, as it turned out, he needed contact lenses.
“It looked a lot easier for him last night,” Neal said. “It looked like he caught the ball a lot better. It looked like he was a little more focused.”
This Saturday, the Lobos will make a return trip in to USC in a home-and-home season after hosting the Trojans a year ago at WisePies Arena. Last year the Trojans captured a 66-54 win over the Lobos in Albuquerque.
Like the Lobos, USC (2-0) surged past the 80-point mark in its first games this season. The Trojans dumped San Diego 83-45 then outlasted Monmouth 101-90. Saturday will be the third straight home game for USC.
USC will start a completely different lineup than it did last year, Neal said, but there are aspects from last year’s contest he can apply to this meeting.
“It's like all coaches do,” Neal said. “We've done the same thing for nine years and people know what we're going to do. It doesn't mean you can stop it. We're going to try to do some things that we did last year that was productive.”
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UNM will need to stop USC’s dribble penetration and transition game, Neal said. That will be the case more because that is the Trojans’ strength rather than being a weakness for his own team, he said.
USC has five players with double-digit scoring averages through two games, led by Jordan McLaughlin with 21, followed by guard Elijah Stewart with 17, Julian Jacobs with 15 and forward Nikola Jovanovic with 12. Guard Katin Reinhardt, a transfer from Mountain West member UNLV, also cracks that list with 10.5 per game.
Brown counters with a 17.7-point average, with Cullen Neal at 16.3 and Williams at 15.7.
“It's like I told the guys, the easiest ways to stop transition is to take good shots and score a lot of baskets,” Craig Neal said. “It we can execute and do that, we'll be fine.”
J.R. Oppenheim is the managing editor of the Daily Lobo. Contact him at managingeditor@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @JROppenheim.
