Weekend wrap

We’ll have a story about Michael Boone’s big night in Santa Barbara in Monday’s paper. But let’s clean out the notebook after 700 miles worth of basketball coverage.

The good news: The general feeling outside the locker room was positive after Saturday’s loss, but there were different reasons for that.

The players said after the first 10 minutes, they felt comfortable playing against the match-up zone. Most players said they had never seen it before, which explains why efforts to run the offense against a scout defense didn’t particularly prepare the Aggies for the game. Mark Payne especially said he’ll be ready next time, which is good because he spent most of the game handling the ball. Here’s a breakdown of the match-up zone defense that I found on the Internet. I’m not particularly sure I understand it. But I can read a box score and UCD turned the ball over just three times in the second half, which shows some definite progress.

Meanwhile UCD head coach Gary Stewart said he was happy to see his team continue to play defense when the offense broke down. That may sound basic, but it doesn’t necessarily work that way. Most coaches will tell you the sign of a mature team is the ability to compartmentalize failure on one end of the court. With the exception of the last five minutes of the first half, I thought the Aggies did a reasonable job defensively against a team with a lot of weapons.

“That’s one of the first times since I’ve been here that we struggled that much offensively, but were able to maintain the energy defensively,” Stewart said.

The bad news: A consolation prize on the road against a pretty good team is one thing. But the Aggies have now played two lousy games against teams they could have beaten – Cal Poly and Long Beach State. Those defeats seem to lock UCD into a first-day game in the Big West Tournament. It’s hard to see the Aggies climbing out of the bottom five now. That said, UCD has a bunch of home games in front of it and a chance to put some wins together. So we’ll see where this goes.