Robert Casey, WSU Athletics

OGDEN — The time between the end of Saturday night’s game and postgame media availability may have never been longer at the Dee Events Center.

When second-year Weber State head coach Eric Duft finally sat down to address an audience of two, he had some things to say — presumably much of the same things that were said in the time between the buzzer sounding and when he put his words on the record.

“Obviously not good enough tonight in any area,” Duft said to open. “Our team’s lost their competitive edge. They’ve lost their competitive character.”

Weber State men’s basketball twice saw Idaho State dice up its defense to build a double-digit lead before the Wildcats erased the deficits with high-energy play.

But after all that, the final three minutes saw the Bengals build their third 10-0 run of the game and Idaho State once again left victorious, a 74-64 vanquishing that gives ISU four wins in their last six visits to Ogden.

Robert Casey, WSU Athletics

“Every night, we get out there, we’ve got three or four guys, 3 1/2 guys, playing as hard as they can play and we’ve got to get better effort from everybody else,” Duft said. “I told the guys, the guys who are going to play the hardest are the guys who are going to play going forward. This is not acceptable.”

After Idaho State (8-13, 3-5 Big Sky) took a 58-48 lead with 9:45 left, the Wildcats got it back.

Blaise Threatt scored twice at the rim. Dyson Koehler — unquestionably one of the players playing “as hard as they can” — drew a foul and made his free throws, then rebounded his own missed 3-pointer and passed to Dillon Jones for a triple. Then Threatt hauled in a rebound and burst coast to coast for a layup.

That made it 64-64 with 3:21 left, drawing an Idaho State timeout.

Weber State (12-9, 3-5) didn’t score again.

Robert Casey, WSU Athletics

Idaho State showed a cadre of scoring threats: guards Miguel Tomley and Maleek Arington, and forwards Kiree Huie and Isaiah Griffin, all scored 14 points apiece, with center Brayden Parker adding 13 points.

Jones totaled 19 points, 10 rebounds, five assists and four steals for Weber State, also committing seven turnovers — some true, some a product of missed calls — and moving past Eddie Gill and Jeremy Senglin into third place on WSU’s career assists list.

Koehler added 14 points, six rebounds and two steals, and Threatt finished with 13 points, four rebounds and two steals.

WSU lost the game despite holding ISU to 3-of-15 shooting from downtown. That’s because the Bengals racked up 20 paint points in each half — either exploiting WSU’s undersized defenders in the post, or more often with drivers blowing by WSU’s on-ball defense and getting big men uncontested dunks layups — a recent trend not unique to Saturday’s game against Idaho State.

“We’ve got a couple guys that are guarding the ball well, we’ve got a couple guys that aren’t,” Duft said. “Once they get into the paint, it’s hard to defend that. So it all goes back to your on-ball defense, are you in the gaps, are you taking away space so they can’t get into the paint? That comes down to an effort thing. At that point, there’s no rotation, you’re just getting beat.”

The first big ISU run put the Bengals ahead 34-20 with 3:15 left in the first half when Tomley hit one of his two 3-pointers. Koehler was a spark, rebounding his own missed free throw and dunking to start a 9-1, half-ending run.

Weber State opened the second half by racking up five steals in the first five minutes, leading to several transition buckets. The last of those was Threatt, who raced to a three-point play. His free throw at the 14:38 mark put the Wildcats ahead 45-44.

It took only five minutes for Idaho State to regain a double-digit lead, getting to the 58-48 margin.

After Weber’s final run to tie the game 64-64, it appeared WSU had the play to keep the rally going and put the Bengals upside down against a home crowd.

Threatt sneaked behind a posting Parker and seemed to have a steal on the entry pass, but the ball jarred loose and rolled toward ISU’s bench. Threatt kept the ball inbounds, where it trickled to Arington sitting alone in a pocket of players. He quickly gathered the ball, drove and scored while fouled, and completed the and-one to put his team up 67-64 with 2:55 left.

“I thought we got really unlucky on that one … Blaise comes from behind and steals it, he deflects the ball, he’s trying to get control of it and it just kind of went off his knee. No fault of his own, he’s playing hard,” Duft said. “They kind of pick it up in a weird spot and get an and-one, and that was probably the biggest play of the night.

“That’s a big play, but I’m more concerned with the middle part of the game and where our focus is, where our energy is. Those guys battled to get us to that point but when you’re not playing as hard as you can in the middle part of the game, anything can happen at the end.”

Arington’s loose ball and-one was Idaho State’s first field goal in 6 1/2 minutes and somehow things instantly switched: WSU then missed its final six field goal attempts and the game quickly slipped away.

“Some of our effort, our inability to handle adversity, is really hurting our team right now. That’s mental toughness, that’s being engaged. We had more missed assignments tonight than I think we probably had in the first five or six games of the season combined,” Duft said. “Guys have to look themselves in the mirror. It’s got to get fixed, or we’re going in a different direction with some guys.

“So that’s where our team is at. I wish it was better, it’s not. We still have time to fix it. We have a good team when we’re engaged. When we’re not, we’re not very good … there’s too many good players in college basketball right now, you don’t just show up and win.

“We’ll either figure it out, or we won’t,” Duft continued, “but if we don’t figure it out, it won’t be because we’re not playing the guys who play the hardest. So we’re going to make some changes in that area.”

Weber State now hits the road to play an improving Northern Arizona (10-11, 3-4) squad Thursday before battling second-place Northern Colorado (12-8, 5-2) on Saturday. Those teams are a combined 12-1 at home this season.

“It’s gut-check time now. We are past anything else,” Duft said. “We are at the point where we’re either going to get better or we’re going to get worse … it’s up to each individual to dig down deeper. We’ve proven we can do it, we’ve beat great teams this year. But we’ve lost some of that.”

How will Weber State determine what changes to make?

“We’re going to find out who’s engaged in practice,” Duft said. “We want to go with some veteran guys, and that’s important, but we’ve got some younger guys we might just have to look at … It’s obvious who’s engaged and if you’re not going to be engaged and you’re not bringing every ounce of energy you can bring to the game, you won’t be playing anymore.”

Saturday night, WSU got four points from the bench on two nice, slicing drives from Viljami Vartiainen resulting from stellar passes by Jones. Vartiainen otherwise missed two open 3s in the final three minutes, KJ Cunningham shot 0 of 3 from the 3-point line and was minus-14 in the plus-minus ledger in just 11:36 of playing time, and Handje Tamba grabbed one rebound and missed one free throw in 5:06.

Tamba, a redshirt sophomore, appears to have regressed after a strong finish to the 2022-23 season, and fellow backup center Arnaud Revaz, a junior transfer from Maryland, can’t seem to avoid negative plays enough to keep himself on the court.

“We’re playing so small sometimes because we’re trying to find the guys who will play the hardest. We can’t find a (center) who gets in there off the bench and gives us something. So we’ll have to address that, too. You’ve got guys like Marko (Sarenac) and Louie (Jordan) — they’re young players but they’re not doing any worse than some of those veteran guys. So these guys better get themselves ready.”

It’s the same defense, Duft says, that helped Weber State win on the road at Saint Mary’s and Oral Roberts, and led a big neutral-site win over Yale. “We were just doing it at a much higher level, with a lot more competitive edge,” he said.

“We changed some stuff on offense to try and help us but none of that’s going to matter if you don’t have enough guys buying in. It feels like we get three or four every night but we can’t get them all. So we’ll have to make some changes, that’s just where it’s at. Give some other guys a chance.”

IDAHO STATE 55, WEBER STATE 47

Weber State women’s basketball fought off a bad second quarter, took the lead with five minutes left and had the game tied with three minutes remaining — a 4-4 start to Big Sky play, the best in five years, just a few moments away.

But Idaho State held home court and finished the game on a 10-2 run for a win — holding a Weber State team that pulled down 10 offensive rebounds in the fourth quarter to only 14 points in the frame.

Daryn Hickok led Weber State (6-15, 3-5 Big Sky) with 17 points and seven rebounds. Amelia Raidaveta scored 10 points. WSU shot a putrid 18 of 62 (29%) overall and 3 of 25 (12%) from the 3-point line, struggling to generate decent looks for most of the game.

Maria Dias hit three clutch jumpers in the fourth quarter, leading ISU (9-10, 5-3) with 13 points. Laura Bello and Nika Lokica each had 10 points.

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