Cougars have habit of starting slow, finishing fast

PULLMAN – Time for a moratorium. So Washington State is glacial out of the gate. So deal.

The basketball game is five minutes old, or six, or seven. The Cougars are down 10 points, they’re down 11. They’re just down. Their shift has started, but they’re still crawling through the Starbucks drive-thru.

It’s not how you want it. It’s not how they want it. It’s not how the coach wants it. It will cost them sometime. It already has. Cost them a perfect season so far.

Pity.

But somewhere between karma and cause-and-effect, there is a flipside. When the din in an arena blisters the eardrums and no one can remember if the game’s first basket was a dunk or a half-court hook out of the Meadowlark Lemon collection, the Cougars are there. Five minutes to go, or four or three, and if they somehow just seemed to be keeping their opponent company before, they are suddenly right there, and it is their ballgame to win.

And mostly they do.

Even this time, against Oregon. On Sunday evening, in front of a Friel Court jury that wasn’t actually 11,120 but was considerably louder than that, eighth-ranked Wazzu finally beat the Ducks for the first time in the last 14 tries, 69-60.

Fugitives from the law of averages no more

“It feels so good to beat them,” said senior forward Robbie Cowgill, who obviously hadn’t heretofore. “There wasn’t really jubilation in the locker room, but almost a sense of relief that we got them, finally. Especially among the older guys who’ve been through all the losses.”

The same guys who have learned to turn them into wins.

In that respect, what the Cougars have done over the course of the past two years is simply tension transference. There is anxiety when your team is 16-1, but not the anguish of 11-17. For instance, coach Tony Bennett credited the crowd for lifting the Cougars’ energy level at every important juncture and cited the case of backup forward Caleb Forrest, a 6-foot-8 thumper who several times got switched off to chase the Ducks’ 5-foot-6 tsetse fly, Tajuan Porter, on defense.

“He was so exhausted he had to run off the bench and throw up,” Bennett reported.

But it was the good kind. See, when we say the Cougs make all the plays at game’s end, we really mean all the plays.

OK, mostly we mean the more traditional plays.

Derrick Low made a slew of those and a slew of points, 27 in all, a respectable encore to the 37 he put up in a loss to the Ducks here last year. Kyle Weaver came up with the lead-for-good basket. Taylor Rochestie, scoreless until the final 42 seconds, nailed the four clinching free throws.

And they all mattered, but probably not as much as the three defensive stops the Cougars made in the space of 90 seconds – forcing the Ducks to exhaust the shot clock once, getting a hurried long jumper by Malik Hairston and finally a layup by Bryce Taylor that Cowgill managed to get enough of a hand on to steer off the rim.

Not that they were picture perfect.

On the Hairston shot, Cowgill admitted that he “got caught up a little on a screen and he got a good look at it, but he missed – and I’m really glad.” And on the Taylor layup, “he flat beat me.

“I was thinking, ‘No 3s, no 3s,’ and the next thing I knew he was by me. I just thought, ‘Rob, you’ve got to get a piece of this.’ That would have been a big-time game changer if he’d made it.”

In the end, the Ducks missed their last seven shots, making it not-so-important that the Cougs made so many of theirs.

But still, one way or another.

Of course, the Ducks can point to the 13 previous times they’d made all the plays – and coach Ernie Kent recalled that “probably 10 of those games came down to the last minute.” For the Cougs, that was mostly a function at first of where the program was at – somewhere south of nowhere – and later of a stylistic problem that of all their Pac-10 opponents is probably toughest to solve.

“They get you stretched out and then you have to recover from long distance,” said Bennett. “They cause us to look silly at times. But I challenged them – when you’re on the ball, try to stay in your stance and work. Because when you get beat off the dribble quick, no defense in the world can help.”

How about psychology? Wazzu led in this game for less than three minutes, and that would seem to argue against positive thinking – no matter how loud the crowd.

“One of their greatest attributes,” said Bennett, “is that they just play on. They keep playing and they don’t stop.”

Once they start, of course.