When Aztecs players show up to practice today, they’ll be using yet another different basketball.

They had been playing with a Nike ball with a tracking chip implanted for their first five home conference games, then received a waiver from Nike to use a Wilson ball that closely resembles the one in the NCAA Tournament. Now they’re back to Nike, since the Mountain West has a marketing contract with the apparel and equipment company for its basketball and soccer tournaments.

But it won’t be the shiny orange Nike ball that drew so many complaints across the conference and that Flynn called “horrible.” This Nike ball looks suspiciously similar to the model that SDSU used in previous seasons — before the conference contracted with ShotTracker to provide real-time analytics — and was praised by the players because of its wider, deeper grooves and better grip.

“Teams have expressed their thoughts on the basketballs,” Dan Butterly, the Mountain West’s senior associate commissioner, said of the controversial Nike model. “Nike met with their factory reps and ultimately decided that they wanted to reproduce the basketball to the specs that they wanted, and they came out with an improved basketball for the Mountain West Tournament.”


About a half-dozen balls were sent to teams last week for practice ahead of the tournament that started for the women on Sunday and starts for the men on Wednesday. The conference has its own allotment of new balls for games and used a device that artificially wears them to improve grip.

The question now is whether the latest, greatest Nike balls have the dead spot that some players complained about from the tracking chip in other balls (and was independently verified in unscientific tests by the Union-Tribune). When dribbling directly on the logo indicating where the tracking chip is embedded, many balls do not fully bounce back.

(Update: An informal test with the new ball at SDSU practice indicated that it still has a slight dead spot.)

“We’re not sensing any (dead spots) in the new balls,” Butterly said. “We haven’t seen it. We’ve played five women’s games with it and we haven’t had any issues. The coaches have been really excited about these balls.”


The statistics so far reflect that. Through three play-in games and two quarterfinals, women’s teams are shooting roughly what they did during the regular season.



SDSU recruit to play in San Diego

You can get a sneak peek at Aztecs commit Lamont Butler Jr. on Tuesday night, when his Riverside Poly team plays at San Diego’s Saint Augustine at 7 in the Division I state playoffs.

Poly (26-6) and Saints (24-6) met in December in the Torrey Pines Holiday Classic, with the Saints winning 75-59. However, this time they won’t have injured guard Tyson McWilliams, who had 29 points in the first meeting. And Poly will have leading scorer Evan Oliver, who was hurt early in that game.

SDSU’s other Southern California commit, guard Keith Dinwiddie Jr., is also in the Div. I playoffs with Fairfax after being named CIF-L.A. City player of the year. The Lions open against Windward, which beat Poly for the Div. I CIF-Southern Section title last week.