In lieu of finishing up the Oregon State preview, I decided to head down to the Galen Center and check out the Trojans preseason exibition game against Azusa Pacific.

Pretty empty for tonight's game, but its great just to see a game at Galen again! It is really amazing where Floyd has taken this program in three short years as USC is ranked #18 in the preseason AP after once again losing their top two scorers.

More Pics After the Jump!

Derozan looks for a lane, but the defenders have already collapsed into the middle

Casey and Mamadou fight for a rebound. 

Taj boxes out hi opponents and gets set to pull down the board.

Demar performs an inadvertent pirouette as he (gracefully) drops the ball into the hoop.

Donte leads the charge down court

Keith with an authoritative dunk!

Taj powers his way to the hoop

And the last of the dunk pictures, takes it up in the open court. Sadly without an acrobatics.

It seemed like Taj was at the free throw line every couple minutes, but...

Team free throw shooting was absolutely atrocious at one point.

Demar with a nice pull up jumper.

There were a surprising number of APU students there. Who would have thought? Maybe they heard about Mercer?

Donte played solid D the whole game

Dwight went leaping into the press after trying to pull down a long rebound

Final Score

Casey Cunningham had a great game and will be a big boost off the bench or even as an occasional starter. Donte Smith was also huge with excellent play on defense and double digits in assists. Daniel Hackett and Leonard Washington did not play for some reason, and Alex Stepheson was not allowed to play either as the team has yet to hear from the NCAA about his eligibility this season. One thing that I think everyone in attendance had to have noticed was USC's size and depth. Floyd experimented with a lot of combinations of players (Dunleavy even saw the court in the waning minutes), and the Trojans will have a lot of options with regards to who they want to play for any given situation. It was obvious that the game was basically a scrimmage and that the players were just having some fun, but it was still nice to see USC hoops in action once again. Fight On and beat the Anteaters!

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