The Nebraska men’s basketball team celebrated Rienk Mast’s return with a 90-89 exhibition victory against No. 8 BYU and projected top-three NBA Draft pick AJ Dybantsa on Sturday afternoon.
The freshman phenom lived up to the billing with an efficient 30 points, but Mast one-upped him to lead the Huskers to a victory in a game that saw nine ties and 11 lead changes at Pinnacle Bank Arena.
“I just really like the way our guys went out and competed,” Coach Fred Hoiberg said. “I thought they had good juice out of the gate. We dug ourselves a little bit of a hole there, but we didn’t panic …
“I told the guys, this can’t be the highlight of our season. We’ve got to bounce back with an unbelievable effort on Monday when we get back on the practice court. We’ll have a good, long film edit on some things that need to be cleaned up, which there’s plenty. I would like to see us rebound and finish possessions better, especially in those last five minutes of the game, to seal it and make our free throws. But overall, it was good to see our guys go out there and compete at a high level for 40 minutes.”
Here are three takeaways from the (exhibition) win.
“Yeah, I’m Thinking I’m Back”
Five-hundred-seventy-four.
That’s how many days had passed since Rienk Mast last played in an organized basketball game for Nebraska. Knee surgery forced him to miss the entire 2024-25 season and impacted his offseason as well. However, those who watched his return never could have guessed that by the way he shot with John Wick-esque proficiency on Saturday.
Berke Büyüktuncel opened the scoring for the Huskers with a layup, then Mast stepped back behind the arc and let it fly three minutes into the game, finding the bottom of the net.
“I had a good feeling going into the game, so I was just kind of waiting until my moment that I was open,” Mast said. “I would say the first one probably wasn’t that open, but it went in. It was good to see it go down and kind of get in a rhythm from there.”
“A rhythm” is an understatement. Mast put the team on his back, scoring 16 straight Nebraska points including four triples. He shifted to playmaker from there, setting up Kendall Blue on a post-up skip to the corner for a 3, then he made a touch pass from the top of the key to get Sam Hoiberg an and-one.
Nebraska’s Rienk Mast (51) moves around a defender for a layup during a college basketball game, Saturday, October 18th, 2025, Lincoln, Nebraska. Photo by Braden Cochran.
Mast then knocked down another trey for a 6-for-6 start from the field before his perfect day ended with a miss at the line. Hoiberg said Mast kept the team afloat early when the offense was still finding its legs.
“I’m happy for Rienk,” Hoiberg said. “That shows maturity, I think, of Rienk Mast, to go out there and do the things that he did. Do you know how hard that is to go out there and play for the first time after not playing any competitive basketball against another opponent for as long as he did, and then to step in like he did? “
He carried 19 points into halftime, which didn’t cool him off in the slightest. The 6-foot-10 forward hit a trailer 3 from the FNBO logo then knocked down his seventh 3 as well before finally missing a heat check. From there, he began looking for layups instead.
Mast finished with 31 points on 11-of-15 from the field (7-of-8 from 3) and 2-of-3 from the line, five rebounds and three assists (accounting for eight additional points) in 29 minutes.
“I think I had that one bottled up for a while, so that was awesome,” Mast said.
BYU coach Kevin Young had high praise for Mast.
“Draft him first right now,” said Young, with a contender for the first pick in Dybantsa sitting right next to him. “The guy didn’t miss a shot, it felt like. He was really good. He’s really, really big obviously, and he got going. I’m sure Fred would want him to shoot it like that every night, but we didn’t adjust and he made us pay. He’s a problem out there because of those two things I just mentioned.”
Sharing the Sugar
There was a lot to like about Nebraska’s offensive performance beyond the 90 points. The Huskers got there by sharing the ball, taking good shots and avoiding turnovers, a point of emphasis from Hoiberg heading in.
“Against pressure, to have the 10 turnovers, I did like that,” Hoiberg said. “We’ve been a little bit loose with it at times. I really stressed going into this one, we didn’t need to go out and all of a sudden do something that we haven’t done all year. I thought Jamarques Lawrence’s pace was absolutely phenomenal. When the ball’s not going in the basket, you have to find a way to impact the game, and he goes out there and leads us in rebounding with seven — we’ve been challenging Jamarques to be better on the glass — and he goes for nine assists and one turnover, but I really thought his pace was the difference in the game.”
Lawrence set the tone as Nebraska finished with 24 assists on 32 field goals. Eleven players saw the court, 10 of them scored, nine of them found the assist column and five of them connected from deep.
“What I like about this team is we’ve got a lot of guys that want to share the ball, and that ball is moving, and we try and find each other,” Mast said. “I know we shot a crazy percentage from 3 today, but if you move the ball like that and you try and find open, we know when we get an open 3, it’s going down more times than not. So our guys understand that, and that just makes the game so fun.”
Mast shouldered the load offensively in the first half, but Connor Essegian came alive in the second to provide support with 14 of his 20 points. He shot 7-of-13 from the field including 5-of-10 from deep in 17 minutes.
Overall, Nebraska shot 50% from the field including 47.1% from 3. Mast and Essegian accounted for 12 of Nebraska’s 16 triples, which isn’t necessarily something the team can rely on every night, but Iowa transfer Pryce Sandfort chipped in 12 points and a pair of triples in his Husker debut as well.
Things started to slip away from the Huskers late in the first half as BYU closed on a 10-0 run to take a 50-46 lead. However, whatever Hoiberg said in the locker room seemed to resonate as Nebraska opened the second half with a 25-9 run in seven minutes to build a 12-point lead.
“That was, I thought, the key part of the game is we went out and really threw the first punch in the second half after a tough ending,” Hoiberg said. “I told them, ‘They got the momentum at the end of the half, we’ve got to go and take it back,’ and our guys went out and did a good job of getting the switch and getting the ball to Rienk and playing off of him. I thought we had good cutting when we got that thing in there, had a couple good high-low plays … When we moved, I thought we had really efficient offense.”
Here We Go Again?
It wasn’t smooth sailing to the finish line for the Huskers, however. Nebraska didn’t make a field goal in the last five minutes, and BYU slowly crept back into the game. A 0-for-6 finish to the game and some missed free throws allowed the Cougars to trim the deficit to one with less than 15 seconds to play, but the Huskers got a stop on the final possession.
“I know we lost a lot of close ones last year, so to have opportunity like that right away to learn and know what we’re doing in a situation like that — I think we gave up an eight-point lead at the end, it came to one, so we’ve got to work on just defending that lead better,” Mast said. “But I’m happy that we showed that we can win close games. In my opinion, we shouldn’t let it come to that, but just happy we were able to close it out.”
While Hoiberg didn’t necessarily run true game-like rotations or maximize playing time for his best players, he said it was valuable for the team to avoid letting the game slip away.
“It was important for us to go out and do everything we could to win … To go out and win a close one like this, it helps,” Hoiberg said. “Last year we lost those three one-possession games in a row, man, you just don’t want to have that, ‘Here we go again’ mentality. To beat a top-10 team in a one-possession game, I think, was important for us.”
Nebraska will get a full week off to tinker with and polish things before taking on NAIA Midland on Oct. 27 to close out exhibition play.
