NEW YORK — Regardless of the franchise that selects him first, second or third in next year’s NBA Draft, AJ Dybantsa will inevitably play who-knows-how-many games at Madison Square Garden over the next 10, 12, maybe even 15 years of his life.
And yet, for whatever NBA glories might await in the decade-plus to come, there’s no guarantee any of his future games in this hallowed building will be as impactful or special as what the 18-year-old did in his debut appearance on Tuesday night at the Jimmy V Classic in BYU’s record-setting, come-from-behind, buzzer-beating 67-64 win over Clemson.
This was the night AJ Dybantsa arrived as an elite college player.
The game-deciding shot, ironically, wasn’t from the hands and arms of Dybantsa, though. Sophomore guard Rob Wright III was the last-second hero, draining a triple that sent the Cougar fans into hysterics.
“Just go ahead and kick it to me,” Wright told senior Mihailo Boskovic before the play unfolded.
The BYU coaching staff told me afterward that the play — which has multiple names, all of which they are holding as a secret — had Richie Saunders as the first option, Dybantsa as the second and Wright III as, what else, the third. So: Saunders was double-covered as he tried to curl open. Dybantsa juked, but wasn’t immediately free. In blazed Wright, who split the space between freshman Zac Foster and senior Butta Johnson and cracked open a cavity that gave him leeway to lift No. 10 BYU to 8-1, in this its final notable nonconference game of the regular season.
Wright said it was his first 3-pointer to win a game in his life.
But the only reason BYU was even in a place to win on Wright’s shot was because Dybantsa broke through and showed No. 1-overall-pick brilliance. Years down the way, when we look back at the start of his journey, this is the game we’ll remember. The same way we remember Carmelo Anthony’s debut at Syracuse coming at MSG in 2002 and Zion Williamson’s moment of arrival in Duke’s debut vs. Kentucky at the 2018 Champions Classic.
And if there’s one play that will stand out over the others, it’s probably this dunk, a tomahawk down the lane that flipped the momentum for good in BYU’s favor as it mauled and bullied Clemson in the second half.
Here in Midtown Manhattan, Dybantsa gave college basketball a gift and BYU fans materialization of hope, as he was everything he’d been promised to be. By game’s end he logged a career-high 28 points, a career-high nine rebounds and a career-high six assists, with almost all of that statistical workload coming in the second half.
This is the AJ Dybantsa we were promised.
And he was unleashed after Cougars coach Kevin Young was so pissed off he barely had anything to say to Dybantsa and his teammates in the locker room at halftime.
Clemson clubbed the Cougars in the first half, closing the final 6:43 on an astonishing 21-0 run to lead 43-22 going into the break. MSG was low on energy — Florida and UConn fans hadn’t begun to arrive for the nightcap — and BYU was bizarrely lethargic. As Young left the coaches’ room and entered the spacious visitor’s locker room, he was a man of few words. Annoyed and fed up with the latest weak first-half effort he saw from his team, he told them it was purely on the players to find a way to win.
“He didn’t really take too much time,” Dybantsa told CBS Sports. “He was like, ‘Y’all gotta go fix it.'”
“I’m a straight shooter with our guys,” Young told CBS Sports. “To a man, I thought they (the Tigers) were playing harder. I really challenged them. There’s no secret to winning. You’ve got to play hard. You’ve got to execute. I know that sounds super ‘coachy,’ but they were playing harder than we were. And I thought in the second half that the trench warfare was won by us.”
Young’s players responded by holding Clemson to four points for the first 11 minutes and 50 seconds of the second half. As the defense stiffened, Dybantsa sparked to life. He unspooled all of that potential into something tangible, something so impressive, all of us are allowed to believe he and BYU have enough to put the Cougars in Final Four Contender status. Specifically, it was his 22 points, seven rebounds and five assists after the break.
No BYU freshman had hit those numbers in a full game in at least 20 years. He outscored Clemson by himself 22-21! He accounted for 34 of BYU’s 45 points after halftime. Dybantsa’s 28 points is the most by a freshman since TJ Haws had that many in 2017. Soon enough, he’ll hit 30, probably 35, maybe even 40.
“I told AJ, ‘You have to put two halves together. He can’t do this in the Big 12,'” Dybantsa’s father Ace told me after the game. “If he’d have played in the first half the way he did in the second, he would’ve had 40.”
There was a dazzling, Jordan-esque fadeaway from the right side, about 15 feet out, that coolly cashed to make it 47-42, Clemson, with 9:55 to go. There was the alley-oop to Keba Keita that gave BYU a 55-54 lead with 3:18 left, one of, like, five head-turning physical moments from Keita that also helped disintegrate Clemson’s spirit.
In putting on the best game of his young career, Dybantsa also provided BYU with its greatest second-half comeback in school history. The Cougars had never won a game after being down by as many as 22 points at halftime.
“His processing ability is, I think, probably the most impressive thing about him,” Young told CBS Sports.
There is also a simple, level-setting approach that Young, who spent more than a decade coaching as an NBA assistant, is imparting to Dybantsa. Pick a spot. Go where you want to go, do what you know you can do. Against Clemson in the first half, Dybantsa was getting too comfortable living along the baseline. In the second half, that changed. He emerged a different player.
“Like Kevin Durant, something me and Monty Williams would talk about,” Young said. “I think they used to use it with Tim Duncan: just pick a spot. That’s something he and I have talked about. Tonight, I thought that’s where he was at his best, just getting to his spot, raising up, and then the thing I love about him is he’s so versatile. You know, he’s in pick and roll. He’s throwing lobs to Keita. Two huge plays. So he’s not just like a one-trick pony. He can do a lot of different things. And to do it on this stage and do it down the stretch, for a young guy in this building? It’s pretty cool.”
I asked Dybantsa and Wright the word they’d use to describe what happened in the second half, to come back from 22 down, to do it at their first time playing inside the World’s Most Famous Arena.
They used the same word at the same time.
“Surreal.”
Then they both smiled. This was a big night for everyone in that program.
“We with each other all day, spending a bunch of time together, so all the stuff that he’s doing, I see him do it a million times,” Wright said of Dybantsa, “but it feels good to see him doing that at the highest level.”
This Clemson win is the first major milestone at the beginning of a journey dripping with promise and the potential for greatness. A corner has been turned at the quarter-mark of BYU’s season.
“That’s crazy. Already?” Dybantsa said when I brought up the timeline.
Yep, already. This is going to go by so fast.
A quarter of the way into the season and we’ve been treated not just to a higher-than-usual inventory of really good games, but a bevy of incredible talent. Included in that is maybe the deepest freshman class ever. Dybantsa has always been mentioned at the top of that list, and it’s because of what he’s capable of doing — what a packed house saw happen here near game’s end on Tuesday night and what the nation took in on TV.
BYU is good … but it can be great. If it gets there, it will have to be because of Dybantsa, whose first flash of greatness on the Garden stage doubles as a beacon of legitimate hope for potentially the best season in program history.
