After its biggest loss of the season, the Long Beach State men’s basketball team will try to regroup in San Diego on Wednesday night against No. 13 San Diego State.
The 49ers (5-5) are coming off Friday’s 29-point loss at Stephen F. Austin, the first of a six-game road trip. Before the start of the road trip, head coach Dan Monson said the team needed to improve in all aspects: defense, offense and rebounding.
“We’re not good enough right now to win any of those six games,” Monson said. “We have to play our best game of the year Friday to have a chance, and that’ll be the case for the next six.”
Senior guard Tyler Lamb said he feels good about the upcoming schedule, and he’s excited about the opportunity to face so many big-name schools.
“It’s going to be a very good test for our team to see how we handle that adversity of being on the road that long against these top teams in the country,” Lamb said. “I think we will only learn from this experience and get better. We play three top-25 teams, and that’s what the tournament’s going to be like.
The Aztecs’ standing will likely to change after its 49-36 loss on Sunday night against Washington, a team LBSU has also lost to this season.
The Aztecs (6-2), led by head coach Steve Fisher, have been one of the most successful teams in college basketball over the last five years, with five consecutive NCAA Tournament playoff appearances and 20-plus winning seasons. Junior forward Winston Shepard leads the team in scoring with 10.3 points per game.
Monson said he’s excited about playing perennial NCAA Tournament teams like SDSU. He said it’s something his players look forward to.
“We want to see where we’re at,” Monson said. “That’s what we did at Xavier. We went and saw them. We weren’t good enough at some things. We worked hard at it, and we were rewarded 12 days later.”
Although the Aztecs have trouble scoring, averaging 62 points per game on 39 percent shooting as a team, Monson stressed the importance of improving and playing well no matter how bad a team struggles in a certain area.
“It’s not just our defense that needs to get better,” Monson said. “We need to be a better basketball team in the next couple weeks, or we’re going to lose six in a row. If we do that, so be it. But we have to get better in the process, and we need to learn from these games.”
Lamb said he thinks the team has the right mentality going in.
“This is just all preparing us for [the rest of preseason], and for the Big West,” Lamb said. “I think teams like Louisville and Texas, obviously they’re bigger than the Big West schools, so when we play teams like that, it just helps us prepare. We don’t just play them just to play them.”
The 49ers will play No. 13 SDSU Wednesday night in San Diego at 7 p.m.