HONOLULU — The Hawaii men’s basketball team scrapped for two hard-fought home victories over the past three days to remain in the upper echelon of the Big West Conference.
However, because of a scheduling tweak by the Big West for the 2022-23 season, there is no rest for the Rainbow Warriors amid one of their most challenging portions of the slate. Coming off its 58-51 win over Cal State Northridge in a very rare Monday conference game, UH (14-4, 5-1 BWC) travels to the mainland Tuesday for Thursday’s game at UC Irvine, and follows up Saturday at UC Riverside.
Normally, teams have from the previous Saturday to recover for the next two conference games the following Thursday and Saturday. The Saturday-Monday format, which appears twice during the 20-game conference season, was added by the league office in order to front-load a bye for teams and break up the monotony of Thursday-Saturday games.
But as a consequence of having the longer layoff some weeks, teams must play a tighter series of games over the following days to keep pace.
A few days prior to Saturday’s 79-70 win over Long Beach State, when UH had some extra rest time, coach Eran Ganot expressed wariness about the upcoming four-games-and-eight-days stretch.
“I don’t think it’s ideal,” Ganot said. “But it’s a unique calendar year. I don’t think it’s supposed to happen moving forward, because this was a little bit of a calendar anomaly. It is what it is.”
After the CSUN game, he said of his thoughts on it, “The same. Flip the script, embracing the challenge of it. And a lot of other teams are doing it too.”
The Big West women are in the same predicament with their mirrored home-and-away schedule to the men. The Rainbow Wahine return home Tuesday following a 1-1 road trip at LBSU and CSUN, in which they closed with a 76-60 win over the Matadors.
Rainbow Wahine coach Laura Beeman is not a fan — especially when factoring in travel between sites. She would prefer a straight Thursday-Saturday format through the 20 BWC games. The Wahine host conference leader UC Irvine on Thursday.
“It’s not a bye. It’s just fluff. To have five days off to go into Long Beach, but then you have three games in five days, or four games in eight days, this is the worst Big West schedule that I have been a part of,” the 11th-year coach said. “It’s my least favorite. … To put these kids on planes and buses and travel them around and have them play so many games in such a short amount of time, I just don’t think it equates to good basketball and good health for these kids.”
Ganot’s Rainbow Warriors said they will call upon their experience with quick turnarounds from their nonconference tournaments; they’ve already played three times in four days on two occasions. Granted, those were all at the same site, at home.
CSUN coach Trent Johnson had no qualms about one of his team’s toughest stretches; the Matadors played at Irvine on Saturday before flying out to UH for the Monday game, then head back to the mainland and play at UC Santa Barbara on Thursday.
Johnson, a veteran coach who brought talented Nevada teams to UH in the old Western Athletic Conference, asked rhetorically if a college basketball player would rather negotiate tough travel to play a real game, or go to a team practice instead.
"I don’t much stock in that," Johnson said of schedule complaints. "There’s good teams and good players and they compete regardless of when and where you play. That’s what they do.”
Case in point, point guard JoVon McClanahan, who scored 13 points with five assists Monday, was unfazed by the prospect of a road trip on reduced rest. He didn’t chalk up his team’s struggle to put away last-place CSUN — the Matadors (3-15, 0-7) rallied from 19 points down to within one, and had opportunities to tie in the final seconds — to any strangeness about playing on a Monday.
“Long Beach came in here and barely got any sleep and gave us a game,” McClanahan said, referring to the Beach’s mechanical issues during their Hawaiian Airlines flight to Hawaii that caused them to arrive in early morning on Saturday. “CSUN I think just had a game the other night, came in here and flew five hours.
“We’re about to do the same thing,” he added. “It’s really about buckling down and locking in for 40 minutes. There’s going to be battles throughout league play going into the conference tournament. I think every team in the Big West knows that. Every team is beatable. It’s just about who’s going to be solid.”
Brian McInnis covers the state’s sports scene for Spectrum News Hawaii. He can be reached at brian.mcinnis@charter.com.