Hawaii gets first Big West tournament win in midst of chaotic season

The Hawaii basketball team was off to a shocking, tumultuous start before the first tipoff.

In October, Hawaii abruptly fired its coach, Gib Arnold and an NCAA investigation began. Optimism and hope and goals are blossoming in programs around the country in the fall, but the Warriors were facing a national scandal and considerable challenge with alleged serious violations and possible sanctions looming.

Hawaii promoted assistant coach Benjy Taylor to interim coach, and thus the long road paved with scandal started.

The journey has been filled with ups and downs, but the Warriors bought into Taylor's ways, and No. 5 Hawaii dispatched No. 4 Long Beach State, 79-72, Thursday at the Honda Center in the Big West Conference quarterfinals.

It was Hawaii's first conference tournament victory since joining the Big West three years ago.

"We haven't been in this situation a lot the last 12-14 years," Taylor said. "That is the first time we won a first-round game in a while. This is a resilient group of young men. I couldn't be prouder of how we won."

And winning could've been just getting through the season.

The Warriors (21-12) advanced to Friday's semifinals and no longer have to board that Thursday night five-hour flight back to Honolulu.

Long Beach State made the 20-mile trek home via bus. What a difference in commutes.

Hawaii has traveled the long way through the season but it is reaping success under Taylor.

"You've got to get them a lot of credit," Long Beach State coach Dan Monson said. "Their staff has held that program together and they've won 21 games and had a very good season."

Taylor isn't surprised by the victory in March Madness, not when Hawaii has weathered enough madness for an entire season and its best player, Isaac Fotu, was ruled ineligible by the school days before Arnold was fired. He then turned professional.

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And Hawaii turned toward work without two pivotal figures from the year before.

Senior uard Garrett Nevels was key Thursday, scoring 17 points for the Warriors. Hawaii had four steals in the final four minutes. Aaron Valdes added 14 points. And Hawaii added one very important victory to its resume.

Not much has surprised Taylor about how Hawaii's solid season.

"Not really," Taylor said. "They take my lead, and I stay pretty calm and stay pretty positive with them. They stick together. They know they can make plays on both ends of the floors. I felt like we could win the game and make a run at this tournament if we got healthy. I think we only finished fifth place because of the injuries. I had nine starters miss games. We still finished .500. If we're healthy, we're pretty good and we're healthy."

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Not everything has been easy. Even the seemingly simplest things became pesky problems during the fallout from the investigation.

The task of getting uniforms got lost in the shuffle, and Hawaii was scrambling to get numbers and names on their green-and-white jerseys. They wore practice jerseys for exhibition games and had only their road jerseys to wear for the first home game.

The jersey fiasco was when Taylor knew Hawaii would be OK.

"When everything went haywire and we didn't have uniforms, and some of the numbers were pasted on, that's when I knew we'd be pretty good because it wasn't a big deal to anyone," Taylor said. "Guys were telling me, 'Coach, give me whatever number you have.'"

Taylor has seemingly called the right numbers all season and Stefan Jankovic, Stefan Jovanovic, Roderick Bobbitt & Co. have delivered.

Hawaii fans came to the Honda Center to celebrate that first conference tournament victory, and that meant a lot to Taylor.

"The town has really embraced us and our style of play," Taylor said. "We've had great support. We might have the biggest here all day, and that's great from 3,000 miles away."

Hawaii is focused on basketball while a cloud of uncertainty hangs over the program. And it's working.

"As a staff and a team we can control what we can control," Taylor said. "We want to control playing basketball. We can't control the outside negative stuff and sanctions and firings and (our) best player leaving. We've just got to control what we can control. We've done a good job of that all year, staying focused and having laser-point focus on what we're trying to do."

They're trying to make something out of a mess and doing a fine job of it.