The Arizona State Sun Devils can’t catch a break.

After an impressive 66-54 road victory over Kansas State on Sunday, the Sun Devils were hoping to ride that momentum into a huge home game with red-hot BYU.

But ASU coach Bobby Hurley only had five scholarship players available for most of Wednesday night’s game.

Arizona State (13-15, 4-13) scratched and clawed to stay in the game, but ultimately didn’t have the depth to compete with No. 25 BYU in a 91-81 loss at Desert Financial Arena. One of the best shooting teams in college basketball, the Cougars shot a blistering 53% (17-of-32) from behind the 3-point line.

Richie Saunders led BYU with 26 points and 6 rebounds, and Basheer Jihad led Arizona State with 19 points and 4 rebounds. Freshman Trevor Best came off the bench to score a career-high 18 points for ASU, and fellow freshman Joson Sanon had 18 points, 5 rebounds and 4 assists.

Jayden Quaintance injured again

Five-star freshman Jayden Quaintance — who had arguably his best game of the season vs. Kansas State — injured in his knee on Sunday and did not play against BYU.

Quaintance has now missed four games this season with foot, ankle and knee injures. He’s averaging 9.4 points, 7.9 rebounds and 2.6 blocks. His status for the rest of the season is unclear.

The youngest player in college basketball at just 17 years old, Quaintance is projected to be a lottery pick in the 2026 NBA Draft. He’s not eligible for this year’s draft because he is too young.

BJ Freeman kicked off team

The Sun Devils entered the BYU already without leading scorer BJ Freeman, who was kicked off the team over the weekend for an accumulation of conduct detrimental to the team. Freeman was ASU’s leading scorer at 13.7 points per game.

Freeman, who transferred to Arizona State from Milwaukee in the offseason, was ejected from Arizona State’s loss to rival Arizona on Feb. 1 for head-butting Caleb Love with 30 seconds left in the game. He was then suspended for ASU’s game at Oklahoma State on Feb. 9 for conduct detrimental to the team.

“It was just unfortunate that it came to this,” Hurley said after the Kansas State game. “He’s our leading scorer and a very productive player for us. It’s just we’ve had too many instances of either player or coach conduct with BJ, and he was already suspended once. It was a really hard decision to make, but it was based on this year, and he’s got another season to play. I’m sure that he’s going to still have a really good market for a place to land next year.”

Alston Mason sick, Adam Miller hurt

With Freeman gone, senior guard Alston Mason is now Arizona State’s leading scorer at 12.7 points per game. But Mason has an undisclosed illness and was not available for the BYU game.

To make matters worse, senior guard Adam Miller went down with an apparent hip injury early in the game and played limited minutes. He left the game for good with 13:09 left in the second half.

Without Mason and Miller, Hurley had to turn to freshman guard Best, who was Quaintance’s teammate in high school. Best committed to ASU in December after graduating early from high school. He then joined the Sun Devils at the start of the second semester in early January.

Best, who had only played nine minutes of college basketball coming into the game, came off the bench to score a career-high 18 points in 24 minutes. Bobby Hurley’s son, who is not on scholarship, did not score in eight minutes off the bench.

Hurley did not sub for the final 13:09 of the game, going with a lineup of his five healthy scholarship players: Amier Ali, Shawn Phillips Jr., Sanon, Jihad and Best.

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