Depth Lets USD Nine Win in Waves

“Welcome Home Toreros,” said the sign in USD’s gymnasium, “a.k.a. Wave Busters and Lion Tamers.”

This, of course, alluded to last weekend’s sweep of the Pepperdine Waves and Loyola Marymount Lions in West Coast Conference basketball games.

Poster painters might have a more difficult job this weekend. Thursday night, for example, the Toreros played the St. Mary’s Gaels and tonight’s guests will be the USF Dons.

What do you do to a Gael? Or a Don?

I’ll tell you what the Toreros did to the Gaels. They drowned them. That’s what the Toreros do to teams when they are on. They pull them under and get them gasping for air and grasping for the surface. It can be almost as ugly as Jaws.

The final score was 83-68. The Gaels struggled for awhile, but you knew it was over when the bubbles stopped.

USF should probably show up for tonight’s battle for first place with a lifeboat and a rubber ducky, because playing basketball against USD is like trying to walk across Crater Lake with concrete shoes.

The Toreros, you see, are deep. In that victory over St. Mary’s, nine players were in the game before it was nine minutes old, and all nine played at least 17 minutes. And all nine scored, five of them in double figures.

When the Toreros got on a roll, St. Mary’s had to be wondering if maybe all nine of those guys were on the court at the same time. They should have asked the officials to take a census.

In truth, USD never had more than five players in the game at once and Hank Egan, the coach, had to choose which five. This might figure to be a problem, since he first must determine which five to start and thus risk the consequence of bruising an ego or two or four.

“I’ve always had players down there eighth and ninth,” he said, “but I’ve never had a team where the players are equal down there. Sometimes I wonder if I’m starting the right lineup. I’m not sure that some of the kids coming off the bench don’t deserve to start. I’m not sure I know who the five best kids are.”

USD might not have five best players. Maybe he should let the fans vote on the starting lineup. I don’t know how many different combinations of five are possible out of nine players, but Egan would find out.

“Hey,” said Wayman Strickland, a junior guard, “we’re like a chain. All the links fit in place.”

That’s the key. It isn’t who starts, but rather what combination is on the floor at a given time. Egan cannot simply draw names out of a hat and send players out there.

“I have to have an outside shooter in there,” he said, “like Pat Holbert or Mike Brown or Strickland. I have to have one of those guys. If Wayman’s not in there, I have to have Geoff Probst to handle the ball. I need Mike Brown or Anthony Thomas for perimeter defense and the big guys like either Dondi Bell or Keith Colvin for power inside, but I need to think about getting some mid-range scoring . . .”

I had asked him about the mix he tried to put on the floor, and now my pen was running out of ink recording his response.

Egan laughed.

“My wife asked me the same question a little differently,” he said. “She asked me what the hell I was doing out there. I explained to her and she said, ‘That’s really complicated. How can you enjoy the games?’ ”

The games, indeed, are much more enjoyable now than they were during a December skid which included losses to Indiana and UC Santa Barbara as well as the likes of Cal State Northridge and Eastern Washington. The Toreros went from 5-0 to 5-4 in a fortnight.

“We were playing so well together,” Egan said, “and then we came apart together. We went off the edge of a cliff. Players, coaches, the trainer, all of us. We started off staying together because we were winning and we’re winning now because we’re staying together.”

This team is not what one might expect from USD, which used to approach a basketball game like a chess match. It is not deliberate and maybe not even particularly disciplined in terms of style of play.

Again, it has to do with this depth.

“We use nine people to wear the other team down,” Strickland said. “We keep the pace high. We stay constantly on the attack on both offense and defense.”

It is new for Egan as well, who has never been so deep in athletes, not in his six previous years at USD nor his 13 years at Air Force.

“At Air Force,” he said, “we used to shoot once a month.”

These guys bring it down and these guys put it up. When they get tired, another bunch brings it down and puts it up. USF will be wondering if it is up against a basketball team or a tidal wave.