After last week’s tumultuous course of events, the No. 18 ASU men’s basketball team (18-5, 7-4 Pac-10) is happy to be at full strength.

And it will probably need to be, come Thursday’s home showdown against No. 11 UCLA (19-4, 8-2).

Junior guard Derek Glasser, who sat out Saturday’s contest at Oregon State, was in good spirits Tuesday and claimed to be 100 percent for the first time all year. The aggravation of a concussion at Oregon last Thursday was just the latest hit in Glasser’s season, one that has been riddled with injuries.

Coach Herb Sendek, meanwhile, praised his team’s ability to come out of the weekend road trip with two tough wins in the Beaver state.

“We had some wind taken out of our sails, but I thought our guys responded very well this past weekend,” Sendek said. “We really had a gut check this past weekend. … There were a lot of things converging there to make it an unsettling moment for us.”

Glasser wasn’t the only starter who missed time up in the Pacific Northwest. Sophomore forward Rihards Kuksiks was too ill to play last Thursday against UO, but came back Saturday and hit a trio of 3-pointers.

“Most would have been home watching movies and eating chicken noodle soup the way [Kuksiks] felt [Saturday],” Sendek said.

While Kuksiks played a big role in the second half, it was sophomore guard Jamelle McMillan who stole the show on Saturday. Playing in front of his dad, Nate, (current coach of the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers), McMillan hit four first-half 3-pointers and nabbed five steals.

Sendek said he wasn’t surprised at all with the way McMillan stepped up his game.

Presumably Glasser will reclaim his spot in the starting lineup on Thursday, though. Sendek said Glasser’s improvement since freshman year has been “staggering.”

“I can remember his freshman year being at Xavier, and I didn’t know if we were going to get the ball up the court,” Sendek said. “Now he goes into this year and has games like he did at UCLA and plays 42 minutes under tremendous pressure and doesn’t have a turnover.”

Senior forward Jeff Pendergraph, too, said he initially had his doubts about Glasser’s ability to run the point guard at the college level.

However, a lot has changed in those two years.

Glasser is among the Pac-10 Conference leaders in assists at 4.9 per game, and currently holds the league’s second-best assist-to-turnover ratio at 2.1.

Things could have been different, though.

Glasser’s original plan was to walk on at USC for coach Tim Floyd, but the situation didn’t work out. In the summer following Glasser’s high-school graduation, ASU was looking to give out a scholarship vacated by former Sun Devil Kevin Kruger.

Luckily for ASU fans, sophomore guard James Harden — who was Glasser’s high-school teammate — told him to come to Tempe.

“I called [Harden] the day I said I wasn’t going to go to USC anymore,” Glasser said. “He said, ‘Go to ASU.’ I was like ‘All right, are you going to go?’ He’s like, ‘I’m going [to ASU], but I’m just keeping everybody on their toes.’”

Harden still had one more season of high-school ball left, but their coach Scott Pera had been hired by Sendek as ASU’s director of operations just a month earlier.

Turns out it was Harden responsible for getting Glasser and not the other way around.

Reach the reporter at alex.espinoza@asu.edu.