IRVINE, CALIF. >> It’s no easy feat to instill a no-pressure mentality at the most pressure-packed time of the college basketball season.
Yet that’s one of the present challenges for the Hawaii Rainbow Warriors, who struggled mightily against Long Beach State’s press in the first half of a nine-point loss to cap the regular season last week. That 84-75 defeat at the Walter Pyramid locked the teams into a first-round rematch in the 4-5 bracket of the Big West tournament quarterfinals on Thursday.
Re-tooling the press break was a point of emphasis as UH practiced at Irvine Valley College on Tuesday.
By turning to its press, LBSU forced nine Hawaii first-half turnovers. According to UH associate head coach Adam Jacobsen, five of the team’s 12 turnovers in the game were against the press.
“We turned it over … too many times in a row on some careless plays that just aren’t like us, that we made in that game that we’ve got to clean up,” Jacobsen said.
Right around the time UH claimed a 28-22 lead, the 49ers made it an end-to-end contest. It coincided with a lapse of composure by the ’Bows and an 11-0 Beach run. LBSU took a six-point halftime lead and weathered UH’s comeback attempts in a more traditional halfcourt game in the second half.
“I thought that was a big key in the game, was that point when we did struggle against the press,” Jacobsen said.
Playing more up-tempo isn’t necessarily a bad thing for UH, which beat the Beach 114-107 in a track meet of an overtime game in Honolulu on Jan. 14.
“If teams are pressing us, we want to use that to our advantage,” point guard Brocke Stepteau said. “Break the initial trap and then we should have numbers, fast-break numbers to be able to get easy shots. So we just want to make sure everyone’s on the same page. We’ve been working on that the past couple days. We can use them pressing to our advantage to get easy baskets.”
They proved that when they do it well, they can capitalize; UH scored 14 points on fast breaks when The Beach extended its defense past halfcourt, per Jacobsen.
“I think we just gotta stay calm and take care of the ball. If we stay calm, we’ll pick them apart that way,” said guard Leland Green, who had a career-high 25 points in the teams’ first meeting and 14 in the second.
The UH staff has extensively broken down tape of the home-and-home split with the 49ers. They expect their counterparts to have done the same and prepare variations on what worked.
“Some teams will come at you with one press,” Jacobsen said. “They actually had about three different types of press (at the Pyramid). … When they switch their press from one to the other, (that’s) when we kind of struggled a little bit. Now we want to make sure we clear up the two or three different types of press breaks that we need to attack their two or three different types of presses.”
BIG WEST TOURNAMENT FIRST ROUND
Thursday at Honda Center, Anaheim, Calif.
Game 1: No. 2 UC Davis (19-12) vs. No. 7 Cal Poly (11-19), 10 a.m.
Game 2: No. 3 Cal State Fullerton (16-13) vs. No. 6 Cal State Northridge (11-18), 12:30 p.m.
Game 3: No. 1 UC Irvine (19-13) vs. No. 8 UC Riverside (7-20), 4 p.m.
Game 4: No. 4 Long Beach State (14-18) vs. No. 5 Hawaii (14-15), 6:30 p.m.
TV: Fox Sports Prime Ticket
Radio: KKEA, 1420-AM
