NCAA Tournament preview: No. 5 Saint Mary’s takes on Grand Canyon
After their 3-5 start, the Gaels went on to win 23 of 25 games to finish the year.
When Saint Mary’s started the season 3-5, Randy Bennett saw a team that needed to get tougher.
Fifth-year senior Alex Ducas was battling through injuries. Junior guard Augustas Marciulionis was failing to fill the void created by Logan Johnson’s departure. Sophomore forward Joshua Jefferson was still looking for his groove. And Aidan Mahaney, a star freshman last year, began his sophomore campaign in a rut, “struggling a bit because there’s so much on his shoulders,” Bennett said.
Last year, Mahaney’s freshman season, couldn’t have gone much better for the hometown kid, as he made the transition from Campolindo to the West Coast Conference look seamless. He shot 40% from 3-point range and 42% from the field, finished 13th in the nation in scoring by a freshman and was named a finalist for the Kyle Macy Award, given to the best freshman in the country.
If Mahaney and the gang could find some perspective, realize they lost to some quality teams (two of them, San Diego State and Boise State, qualified for the NCAA Tournament) and keep working at it, the season would turn around, Bennett said.
And it happened just like that. The Gaels won 23 of their last 25 games, capturing a WCC regular season title and a WCC Tournament title to earn an automatic bid into the NCAA Tournament.
Now they’re set to take on No. 12 Grand Canyon University on Friday at 7 p.m. PT in Spokane, Wash. The winner will play the winner between No. 4 seed Alabama and No. 13 seed College of Charleston on Sunday.
“We’re loaded at every position,” said Mahaney, the team’s leading scorer who earned his second straight All-WCC first-team honors. “It just takes time. I think it’s different when you have the brute of winning on your shoulders.”
Mahaney said the Gaels needed to find their leaders after losing Johnson and Kyle Bowen to graduation. He credits Jefferson with “kicking it into gear” to put together an explosive sophomore campaign in which he averaged 10 points and 6.5 rebounds per game before he suffered a knee injury that has kept him out since early February.
“He doesn’t get enough love,” Mahaney said. “I think he’s an NBA prospect. He can pass, shoot, score. Really good teammate. Hopefully he gets back here next year and he’s ready to roll.”
Without him, the Gaels turned to Mason Forbes, a fifth-year senior who transferred from Harvard and redshirted last year. The 6-foot-9 forward has averaged 10.7 points per game in Jefferson’s absence.
Ducas (10.1 points per game) has gotten healthier as the year has gone on, Mahaney (13.9 PPG) and Marciulionis (12.4 PPG) started to thrive mid-season and Mitchell Saxen (11.7 PPG) has given the Gaels a dominant inside force as they put together another successful season.
“It took a little maturing for some guys, some guys had to figure out new roles, but at the end of the day, we worked so hard and cared so much about one another that we knew it’d flip and it did,” Ducas said.
According to DraftKings, the Gaels are 5-1/2-point favorites against Grand Canyon, a team made up of transfer students who rely heavily on Tyon Grant-Foster, a 24-year-old senior who made previous stops at Indian Hills Community College (Iowa), Kansas and DePaul before landing at Grand Canyon following a two-year hiatus due to a medical issue. He collapsed due to a cardiac arrest while playing for DePaul in 2021 and needed multiple heart surgeries before joining the Antelopes.
Neither the Antelopes nor the Gaels is a prolific 3-point shooting team, but the Gaels’ second-ranked defense (58.7 points allowed per game this season) will need to limit Grant-Foster, a 6-foot-7 wing who averaged 20 points and six rebounds per game this season.