San Diego State was not a traditional basketball powerhouse. They had missed the tournament for several consecutive years, and the well-known players in the school's history, such as Xavier Thames, were still players from the eighties and nineties of the last century.
However, San Diego State was fairly strong this year, with two players possessing NBA-level talent.
Kawhi Leonard stood 2.01 meters tall and weighed 102 kilograms. His build was very similar to Tang Tian's. Having played football until his second year, he possessed a pair of hands far larger than those of ordinary people, making him extremely aggressive on the defensive end.
As a second-year player, he averaged 15.7 points and 10.4 rebounds per game this season. For a player just over two meters tall, his rebounding ability was especially outstanding.
Simply put, he was a Power Forward/Small Forward swing player whose offense was roughly on par with Jimmy Butler's, but whose defense was stronger.
Moreover, unlike Butler's Marquette University, Leonard had a helper: Jamal Franklin, a 1.96-meter small forward with excellent athleticism and driving ability, who averaged 10.2 points and 4.3 rebounds per game this season.
Besides them, their center Draymond Wright was also quite well known. However, unlike Leonard and Franklin, he was known not for his basketball skills, but for his style of play. Trash talk and dirty little moves—he was the kind of player every opponent thoroughly hated.
UConn had drawn an upgraded version of Marquette University in the first round.
Most of the tournament matchups had already been set, but not all of them.
In theory, the field went from 64 to 32, with only 64 teams. But the tournament had 68 teams in total. To warm up the tournament while also giving more colleges a chance to showcase themselves, the extra four teams