Cougars pull rabbit out of hat

TEMPE, Ariz. – Somehow, what transpired Saturday evening in Wells Fargo Arena counts just as much as each of Washington State’s other seven Pac-10 basketball wins, including the road victory against Arizona two days earlier.

It just didn’t seem like it should.

The Cougars scored 12 points in the second half against Arizona State, four of them coming on their first possession. They went 11 minutes and 22 seconds without scoring a point. They turned the ball over nine times, including once with 1.9 seconds left. After that, they allowed Sun Devils freshman Christian Polk a wide-open 3-pointer that could have won the game.

And yet, when that shot went in and out, WSU prevailed 48-47.

“Wow,” junior Kyle Weaver said. “It was ugly but we got it done. We’ll take a road win any way we can get it.”

With the victory against an Arizona State team that remains winless in the Pac-10, the Cougars are now 19-4 on the season and tied with USC for second place in the conference at 8-3, just one game behind UCLA.

The No. 18 Cougars also completed their first sweep of both Arizona schools, as well as their first two-game road sweep in Arizona since 1982.

The game got as close as it did because WSU was completely flummoxed by Arizona State’s 1-2-2 zone. The Sun Devils had played the same set in the first half, but after the break they extended the zone out to the perimeter, taking away any open long-range looks.

“I thought my second-half adjustments were key, the way we came out and attacked that zone,” Cougars coach Tony Bennett said sarcastically. “That was the key to victory right there.

“We were pretty stagnant. We had some uncharacteristic turnovers. It wasn’t pretty, but it’s a victory as the saying goes. I’ll take it and we’re going to learn from it.”

For Arizona State (6-16, 0-11 Pac-10), this was yet another narrow miss. The Sun Devils slowly whittled a 16-point WSU lead down to zero, tying the game at 44 with 2:32 to play. But Robbie Cowgill managed to break the prolonged scoring drought with a 5-foot leaner off the glass, and a pair of Derrick Low free throws provided the winning points with 15.5 seconds left.

After such a shoddy half offensively, though, the Cougars were not yet out of the woods. A Polk 3-pointer with 1.9 seconds left brought Arizona State within one, and when Weaver and Low botched the inbounds handoff, the Sun Devils got their chance to win.

Polk’s shot from the right corner hit both sides of the rim before bouncing out at the buzzer.

“Our guys really played hard,” first-year Arizona State coach Herb Sendek said. “To hold a nationally ranked team to those kinds of numbers, it can’t simply be a function of a lot of chalk dust. …It comes down to guys playing with a lot of constitution on defense.”

For just more than 20 minutes, it appeared that this would be an easy win for WSU.

After defeating the Sun Devils by 20 in Pullman, the Cougars cruised to a 36-24 halftime lead and Daven Harmeling’s four-point play 29 seconds into the second half could have made the rest of the game a moot point. But immediately thereafter the Cougars went cold from the field and watched as Arizona State methodically closed the gap.

Were it not for some important defensive stops – Arizona State scored just 10 points in the final 9 minutes – this almost certainly would have been an embarrassing loss for the Cougars.

“I don’t think we played great defensively, but it was good enough to keep them in the 40s and win,” said Harmeling, who led WSU with 16 points. “I was just thinking, ‘What’s going on? We’ve got to snap out of this.’ We have a history of blowing games like that.”

Notes

The 48 points represented WSU’s lowest winning point total in a league game since defeating Oregon 48-45 on Feb. 17, 1983. … The Cougars hadn’t turned the ball over more than 11 times in a Pac-10 game this season, but did so on 13 occasions on Saturday. … WSU returns home to play Stanford on Thursday and California on Saturday.

WSU 48, Arizona St. 47

Percentages: FG .410, FT .667. 3-Point Goals: 6-15, .400 (Harmeling 3-8, Low 2-4, Matthews 1-2, Weaver 0-1). Team Rebounds: 3. Blocked Shots: 4 (Harmeling 2, Clark, Matthews). Turnovers: 13 (Low 4, Cowgill 3, Harmeling 2, Weaver 2, Clark, Matthews). Steals: 7 (Clark 2, Weaver 2, Harmeling, Cowgill, Matthews). Technical Fouls: None.

Percentages: FG .358, FT .625. 3-Point Goals: 4-18, .222 (Polk 3-9, Glasser 1-2, Pendergraph 0-1, Angounou 0-1, Morill 0-2, Shipp 0-3). Team Rebounds: 1. Blocked Shots: 2 (Pendergraph 2). Turnovers: 10 (Atuahene 3, Glasser 2, Morill, Pendergraph, Polk, Shipp, Angounou). Steals: 6 (Morill 2, Pendergraph, Polk, Shipp, Atuahene). Technical Fouls: None.

Halftime–Washington State 36, Arizona State 24. A–9,240.