By Aidan Joly
With Sunday night’s win against Stanford, the Arizona State Sun Devils are 2-0 in Pac-12 play for the first time since the 2012-13 campaign.
With the league just having finished up its opening weekend of conference play and with no more conference games to be played until much later in the month, the Sun Devils sit in a four-way tie at the top of the 12-team league with UCLA, Utah and USC. (It’s worth noting that Arizona fell victim to an upset from Utah on Thursday.)
Overall, it now sits at 8-1, which included the conference wins against Colorado and Stanford as well as a couple good non-conference wins, including an 87-62 thumping of Michigan on a neutral court last month. Last year, Bobby Hurley’s squad didn’t score its eighth win of the season until February 12 en route to a 14-17 season overall. This is the first 2-0 league start for the Sun Devils in the Hurley era.
As this piece was being written, the December 5 AP Poll was released, with Arizona State receiving 20 points. This effectively puts it at No. 30 in the country.
Hurley and the Sun Devils have done this by utilizing the talent in the transfer portal. Hurley was able to grab Frankie Collins, a former Michigan guard who played sparingly in his freshman year in Ann Arbor and has transformed him into the team’s leading scorer at 12.6 points per game. The Cambridge brothers, Devan and Desmond, have become formidable players in their first years at ASU. Devan, who spent three years at Auburn and didn’t have much of a role, has scored at least 12 points in each of the Sun Devils’ past four games. Desmond, a Nevada grad transfer, has seen his stats dip a bit compared to last year, but is still a solid role player.
Desmond Cambridge’s teammate at Nevada, seven-footer Warren Washington, has joined him to the tune of a team-leading seven rebounds per game and just under eight points per game.
A key returner, DJ Horne, has also played well, albeit a little inconsistent. The Sun Devils have had this level of success without the services of Marcus Bagley, who has not played since the second game of the season after being benched after having a run-in with Hurley and then later suspended for a social media post about the incident, which was a bit of a mess last week. Bagley is probably unlikely to play another game in a Sun Devils uniform, but if they get him back by some stroke, that just adds to what they can do.
Now to talk about the Sun Devils’ chances at making the NCAA tournament. In the Pac-12, Arizona and UCLA are the two locks right now. Arizona is likely to be in the conversation for a 1 seed. USC and Oregon are in the “should be in” category right now. That probably leaves room for one more, maybe two, Pac-12 teams.
Will Arizona State be one of those one or two teams? Right now, it sits fairly firmly on the bubble. It has a couple good nonconference tests coming up, a true road game against SMU on Wednesday and a neutral site game against Creighton on December 12. A true road game against potential fellow bubble team San Francisco on December 21 looms as well.
The Sun Devils need to just rack up wins in games they should win, and a first NCAA tournament trip since 2019 may be in the cards.
AJ Hoops 