Hurley commends BVNW grad Alston Mason for effort, production in faltering season
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KCTV) - Back in the city he played high school basketball in, Alston Mason had family in attendance Tuesday night as he closed out his collegiate career.
While it didn’t end the way the Blue Valley Northwest graduate wanted it to, Mason put up a valiant fight in defeat. The senior guard for Arizona State had a team-high 17 points for the Sun Devils as ASU closed out its season with a 71-66 loss and a disappointing 13-19 record.
“Just stepping up and being there for my team whatever it was -- whether it was scoring, whether it was passing, whatever I needed to do that was my mentality going into the game,” Mason said.
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Mason remained the driving force of a short-handed Arizona State squad that suited up just seven scholarship players for Tuesday night’s loss to Kansas State. By the end of the night, the Sun Devils were down to just six scholarship players after Adam Miller bowed out of the contest.
After opening the season with a 9-2 record in non-conference play, ASU limped its way to the finish line, both literally and figuratively as several key players suffered season-ending injuries or missed several games during Big 12 play. As a result, more was asked of Mason.
The effort in return from Mason was commended by Arizona State head coach Bobby Hurley after he concluded a season that saw him average 36.5 minutes per game.
“With no disrespect to any guards in the Big 12, over the last five or six weeks he’s playing as good as any guard in the conference,” Hurley said. “You love to see that for a senior to finish his career playing the way he’s played. He’s really picked up the slack for the losses that we’ve sustained. He kind of in some of these games put the team on his back.”
A week prior, Mason had 33 points in a losing effort at Arizona. He poured in 26 points against No. 3 Houston in mid-February. Tuesday night against the Wildcats, he was the only Sun Devil who was a positive in plus-minus.
“If you look at his plus-minus, it’s a plus 6 in a game we lost by five,” Hurley said, “and he was only out of the game for four minutes. That tells you his value and why I don’t take him out of the game too often.”
The Tuesday night loss in the First Round of the Big 12 Tournament wasn’t the first time Mason suited up in the T-Mobile Center, just under 20 miles from where he starred as a high schooler in Overland Park, Kansas, four years ago.
“I played here freshman year (at Oklahoma) so I was familiar with the area and everything,” Mason told KCTV, “so it wasn’t foreign to me. But it was good to be back.”
Still, with Mason’s professional future unknown, he says his collegiate career came to a disappointing end.
“Unfortunately it didn’t go the way I expected it to go,” Mason said. “Sometimes that happens. All in all it was good to be back in the program my dad was once in and hopefully I represented it in a good way.”
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