Wyoming wins trip to NCAA Tournament in thrilling fashion vs. San Diego State

By Taylor Bern

Saturday, March 14, 2015 | 7:20 p.m.

Wyoming senior Charles Hankerson Jr. fought back tears during a postgame radio interview. His best friend, 53 percent free-throw shooter Derek Cooke Jr., just sank two shots at the line for the deciding points in a perfectly ugly 45-43 Mountain West championship victory against San Diego State, and all around him Cowboys fans were jumping and dancing on the court at the Thomas & Mack Center.

Two years ago, Wyoming was 10-0 before guard Luke Martinez got into a bar fight that eventually ended his season and sunk the Cowboys. Last year, the Pokes were 17-9 and trying to build an NCAA Tournament resume when Larry Nance Jr. went down with an ACL injury.

This year, the team started 15-2 and entered the Associated Press poll rankings for the first time since 1988. So when Nance and reserve Alan Herndon came down with mononucleosis, it felt to those outside of the program that this was simply the Cowboys’ lot.

Nance missed four games and was clearly laboring in his first two games back, during which Wyoming went 2-4. The only way to fulfill the promise of the past three seasons, to finally reach the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2002 was to become the first team not named San Diego State or New Mexico to win this tournament since 2009.

With a slightly pro-Wyoming crowd filling out the announced attendance of 10,002, the Cowboys led 28-25 at halftime. Then they didn’t score for the first 8:33 of the second half.

Tournament MVP Josh Adams snapped that skid with a 3-pointer, and since San Diego State’s offense wasn’t playing much better — shooting 25 percent in the second half, 32.6 percent for the game — nothing was out of reach. The teams traded the lead back and forth, and after JJ O’Brien’s free throws put SDSU ahead in the final two minutes, Adams came up with his biggest shot in a tournament full of them.

With the shot clock winding down and a defense that had held him to 3-for-11 swarming all over, Adams found a little space in the left corner and buried a 3-pointer for a two-point lead with one minute remaining.

“Try is important,” said Wyoming coach Larry Shyatt, detailing on of his philosophies. “Doing your best; you can’t always control doing your best. There’s another team and a little hoop. But to try to do your best, I don’t know if you can say anything’s more important. Josh really, I think, epitomizes that.”

San Diego State failed to convert a close shot and threw away another possession. Trailing by two with seven seconds left, the Aztecs’ last chance was for Cooke, who was already 3-for-3 at the free-throw line, to regress to the mean.

Cooke calmly sank both.

“Before every free throw, Riley Grabau comes up to me, he’s like, ‘You do this every day in practice. Why not make this one now?’ ” Cooke said of his teammate, who leads the nation in free-throw percentage at 93.8 percent. “Sometimes he talks trash to me, but today he was more positive and I just made all of them.”

For nearly 14 minutes stretching over halftime, the Aztecs allowed only three points yet their offense was so dreadful that they still lost. It’s been a consistent concern for SDSU this season — great defense, occasionally awful offense — and it showed up in a spotlight game the day before Selection Sunday.

However, the Aztecs are safely in the at-large bubble and will join Wyoming in the NCAA Tournament. The real concern comes from Boise State and Colorado State, two teams that lost in Friday’s semifinals and saw the bubble shrink by one this afternoon.

That’s not Wyoming’s problem, though. The Cowboys have had plenty of their own setbacks, and unlike the Rams and Broncos, the Pokes left no doubt by cutting down the nets.

“We’ve been so close before, just seeing it slip right from our fingertips,” Nance said. “To know that this (trophy) is ours, and there’s nothing anybody can do to take that away from us, like I said, it’s everything we imagined and more.”

During his postgame interview, Hankerson was reaching over the sideline table to high five and fist bump nearly every Wyoming fan who was rushing around to get on the court for photos of the trophy and net-cutting ceremonies. When Hankerson took off the headset, he puffed out his chest, screamed and went over toward the swarm.

“We did it! We did it!” Hankerson yelled with his arms spread wide. Then he took a step back and pointed to the fans deliriously screaming at him. “You did it! You did it!

“Hey, we going dancing.”

Taylor Bern can be reached at 948-7844 or [email protected]. Follow Taylor on Twitter at twitter.com/taylorbern.