No. 80 Arizona State 100 (6-1), No. 155 WSU 94 (3-4)

The Cougars injected some life into what has been a bit of a slog of a season already by taking the Sun Devils more or less to the wire, leading by double digits in the second half before crumbling down the stretch under a bunch of 3-pointers from familiar foe, Moe Odum.

The star of the show was freshman Ace Glass, who finally entered the starting lineup, played 32 minutes, and set a freshman scoring record at WSU with 40 points with one of the more incredible and efficient performances you’ll ever see.

The Cougars now play Seton Hall for third place today.

In A Minute

• Recap from our friend (and friend of the pod) Jamey Vinnick at Cougfan

• Stats

• Line o’ the night: ACE GLASS, of course, with those 40 points on just 14(!!) shots — 6-of-9 from 3, 3-of-5 from 2, 16-of-18 from the line. He also had 3 rebounds, 2 assists, a steal and three turnovers.

• One stat to tell the tale: The Cougs allowed 1.41 points per possession as the Sun Devils shot 67% from 2 and 48% from 3.

Highlights

(WSU doesn’t seem to have produced their own package for this one.)

Three Thoughts

1. 40 for Glass: An all-time performance

It has been clear since pretty much the first game that freshman Ace Glass is the most talented player on the roster — the moment he came off the bench to score 17 points in 22 minutes to nearly lift WSU to a comeback win over Idaho, it was obvious he was just a different sort of player from the rest of the team.

For whatever reason, it took until last night for David Riley to put Glass in the starting lineup, but Glass wasted little time stepping into the spotlight with the opportunity: He hit 3s on WSU’s second and third possessions of the game, and he just never stopped scoring. Glass was an absolute menace all over the floor, shooting from deep, getting to the rim, and — most impressively — getting to the line with repeated penetration. He drew a whopping nine fouls on ASU defenders (eight in the second half!) on his way to shooting 16-of-18 from the line.

His 40 points are a new freshman record, and the most by an underclassman in college basketball this year. It also is just the 10th 40-point game in WSU history, the first since Noah Williams did it in 2021¹ :

Obviously, not every 40-point game on that list is built equally; that Glass is just the fourth guy to do it against what we’d consider a “high major” opponent is just another feather in his cap. It was a performance for the ages.

The efficiency with which Glass is scoring in a high-usage role — even off the bench, he was taking a lot of shots — is totally bonkers. To try to put in context what he’s doing, here’s a chart of all the freshman in college hoops who have played 50% of their team’s minutes. The horizontal axis is usage (possessions that end with that player doing something) and the vertical axis is offensive rating (efficiency). The best players are in the upper right quadrant. The red dot is Ace … along with a useful highlighted reference point:

Cameron Boozer (yes, son of Carlos) is roundly thought to be the best player in college basketball at the moment and is going to be a top three pick in the next NBA Draft. That’s the kind of company Glass is keeping right now as the Cougs’ go-to guy. There’s obviously a long way to go in the season, and it’s obviously unlikely he keeps this up, but I think we are going to enjoy the heck out of watching Glass this season.

Unfortunately, there does not appear to be any video dedicated to Glass highlights from the game, other than this brief cut up from WSU:

2. Does Riley read the newsletter?

I had some strong feelings yesterday about Riley’s starting lineup choices this season, and as it turned out, Riley ended up making the exact changes I suggested: Glass and Eemeli Yalaho entered and Adria Rodriguez and Simon Hildebrandt went to the bench. The result was a much faster start and much better energy from the beginning.

But it went beyond just who started — Riley also distributed the minutes (and usage, aka “%Ps”) much more effectively, highlighting his most efficient (“ORtg”) players:

To this point, Riley had been playing a lot of guys roughly 20 minutes. Last night, he leaned into his best players. (Some of that, admittedly, might have been due to foul trouble for Rodriguez, but I’m trying to be generous here.) Ugbo’s return from injury was a surprise, and while he looked like he was moving pretty well on what was assumed to be an injured ankle, he wasn’t particularly productive.

At any rate, Riley’s did a good job with this last night. Hopefully he keeps it up.

3. Dreadful defense, again

With all the excitement over Glass, I understand it’s easy to overlook stuff that didn’t go great. And once again, the defense was horrendous. Like, historically bad horrendous. Riley is now the “proud” owner of not just one, but three of the 10 worst defensive performances at WSU since 1997 (as far back as kenpom goes):

As bad as you thought Ernie Kent’s defenses were — and they were awful — he’s only on this list once. Paul Graham, of course, takes the cake with five, while Kevin Eastman catches a stray. 

I know the Cougs had both offensive and defensive problems early in the year, and that Riley is an offensive coach, so he’s going to try and fix that first. But it remains incredibly alarming that an all-world performance from a player that led to WSU scoring 1.32 points per possession — a better rate than in any game last year, and second this season only to what they did to Southern Utah last week — didn’t win them a game fairly easily.

WSU currently ranks 322nd in adjusted defensive efficiency at kenpom.com, and ranks 356th in effective field goal percentage³ against. That is horrendous, but if we’re looking for any kind of silver lining, I guess it’s this: Even though Riley has never been noted for his defense, his teams have never been this bad. Perhaps some regression is coming, particularly given the crazy rate at which opponents are making their 3s? That’s all I got, really.

Up Next: No. 67 Seton Hall

The Cougs play for 3rd place in the Maui Invitational today at 2:30 p.m. PT⁴ against the Seton Hall Pirates on ESPN2. Kenpom.com (No. 67) and barttorvik.com (No. 86) disagree a lot on the quality of the Pirates, which is entirely due to how each one rates the Pirates’ defense — Pomeroy’s laptop ranks them 24, Torvik’s 69. Torvik’s algorithm is seemingly much less impressed by their domination of four cupcakes at home to start the season.

Either way, Seton Hall is a defense-first team that plays at one of the slowest tempos in the country, fueled largely by their defensive possessions being one of the longest in the country: 18.8 seconds, on average. WSU, of course, is offense forward and likes to play fast, but teams that want to slow it down usually can control that pretty easily.

One of the things the Pirates do best is turn their opponents over, something WSU has avoided all year with the exception of Chaminade. They also are one of the very best teams in the country and 2-point defense and blocking shots. That’s not great for the Cougs.

One of the things the Pirates do worst, though? Put their opponents on the free throw line … BAH GOD, THAT’S ACE GLASS’ MUSIC!!!!

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1  Famously blowing out my podcast partner’s Achilles in the process!

2  J Locklear??? Also, it appears we played Centenary in March because we were on our final weekend, which featured a single game against Washington, and the Gents were playing as an independent and probably needed a game to fill out the schedule. Weird, right? I also learned today that Locklear is currently a senior associate AD at Butler. The more you know!

3  eFG% combines 2s and 3s into one stat that is representative of shooting by making 3s worth 1.5 makes in the equation.

4  Folks, I am sorry if you saw yesterday’s wrong game time. I went off of WSU’s iCal that I subscribe to, and they put it in as 3 p.m. PT. I’m guessing they saw 3 p.m. local time and entered it as PT by mistake? At any rate, I should have double checked!