With the Big West Conference tournament beginning Wednesday night at the Anaheim Convention Center, assistant sports editor Matt Moreno sat down with Long Beach State men’s basketball coach Dan Monson to discuss the season that was, and look ahead to the Big West tournament.
On Thursday, The Beach will face the lowest remaining seed to advance past the opening round. Tip off for that contest is scheduled for 6 p.m.
Monson also confirmed that sophomore Jesse Woodard has been “suspended indefinitely,” and will not be with the team this week in Anaheim.
Matt Moreno: What is the team’s mentality heading into the Big West tournament knowing that it will have to win three games in a row, something it hasn’t done all season?
Dan Monson: The biggest thing is you have to play well and you have to do it one game at a time. … We’re not where we need to be and I think it’s kind of a blessing, from a coach’s standpoint, that we don’t know who we’re playing until late Wednesday night.
That gives us three days where we just have to worry about ourselves. … It’s way more relevant that we’re playing well than whom we’re playing.
MM: Were you shocked that you ended up the 3-seed?
DM: A little bit, but three and four are similar. You can make arguments that it didn’t help us either, if we get to Friday, we’ve always matched up better with [UC] Santa Barbara than Pacific.
I wasn’t really concerned over the 3-seed versus the four. You are surprised because in college basketball, the home team wins so much, and two road teams were going to need to win for us to get the 3-seed. We’re happy because we could have been either five or six too.
MM: Do you think it’s a plus that the conference is so wide open?
DM: I think we do have confidence that we can play with anybody in the league, but vice versa, I don’t think anybody is afraid of us either. It’s going to be a wide-open situation and it wouldn’t surprise me if [Cal State] Northridge beat [Cal State] Fullerton to start the tournament just to prove how wide open it is.
MM: Now that you look back at it, how much of an impact did the nonconference portion of the schedule have on Big West play?
DM: I think it masked, a little bit, some of our deficiencies. First of all, when you play really good teams and they’re trying to get ready for their seasons, they’re not worried about you.
We felt 7-7 was a pretty good achievement going out of that schedule, and really I think it let us be satisfied somewhat. … I think it gave us a false sense of security; thinking now once we get to league it’s going to become easier, and it always gets harder in league no matter what your preseason schedule is. … I don’t regret doing the schedule, I regret we didn’t play better coming out of it and that’s just coaching.
MM: What do you think the main reasons are that the team didn’t end up where it was projected at the start of the season?
DM: We’re still a little bit too young, and I’m not talking grade-wise, but maturity-wise. We didn’t grow up as fast as, say, Santa Barbara’s freshmen. I think they matured and played like juniors or seniors this year.
We played like sophomores, where we were very immature in our execution, our shot selection and in our intensity. Those are things that a lot of sophomores do and that’s why they call it a sophomore slump.
This year, we expected those guys’ roles to change and for them to step into more mature roles, and we just weren’t mature enough to do that in a lot of ways.
MM: What would you say to those who are critical of the team and say that the team didn’t come out with the same effort against teams like Cal Poly as it did against teams like Santa Barbara?
DM: I’d say they’re right, and that’s part of the maturity that I’m getting at. When you get older, you grow up a little bit as a player and you respect everybody. You have a certain pre-game ritual that you do no matter who you’re playing, and it took a lot of the season for the guys to grow into that.
I think we’ve come a long ways there, but I think people were right. There are no excuses; it’s my job to prepare them. But, we had guys that weren’t ready to play in certain games.
MM: Do you think it is something that can be corrected going into the Big West tournament?
DM: Yeah, I think so. But again your margin for error, for every team, is just so slight. And even though I thought by-and-large we played pretty well on Friday, if you give anybody 48 points in one half, your season is probably going to be over. … It’s that consistency thing.
MM: What’s it going to take for the team to make it the NCAA tournament?
DM: The obvious thing is consistency because we haven’t won three games in a row. And really it’s four, because we won one on Friday.
We haven’t been consistent enough, and yet we’ve shown people that we can play with anybody in the league and we just have to do it on a consistent nature.