I'm playing catch-up today as a cold and high school basketball have put me behind a day... stay tuned for UA material as we approach the 1:00 tipoff.
Oregon State was demolished on Thursday night in a game reminiscent of last season. The Beavers kept the game close for most of the first half, then the wheels fell off heading into halftime, and after the half as well.
As I mentioned in the game wrap-up, the Beavers trailed by 15 at half, and lost by 31.
Paul Buker of the Oregonian sheds some light on how miserable the game became for Oregon State:
A nearly 11-minute scoreless spell, a 20-0 Arizona State run, and horrid 16-for-44 (.364) shooting were the numbers that OSU coach Craig Robinson will remember about his first Pacific 10 Conference road game.
The Beavers got decent looks - for eight or 10 minutes - against ASU's physical matchup zone defense, but couldn't get anything to go down.
It was 19-15, Sun Devils, with 5:28 left in the first half after OSU's Lathen Wallace scored on a driving layup.
The next time OSU came up for air, it was 39-15 with 14:23 left in the game.
As we talked about in the open thread, our offense isn't suited for making huge comebacks. We made it happen against USC, but I think a 15-point second half comeback will be a rarity, unless we shoot as well as we did on the comeback trail against the Trojans.
Here is rvm's take from halftime:
With this team and the type of offense they want to play it is easy to play pretty good overall but get yourself in a hole if the other team gets hot and/or you defense is off (as overplaying the ball and leaving wide open jumpers).
Will be hard to get back into it without a "star" scorer, someone will have to get very hot from the outside.
This team is better at picking away and not at as much making big runs, and this will be hard to do against ASU, but heck, we did against USC.
Indeed.
Here's a variation of the quote from Craig Robinson that I used in the post-game piece. This one comes from Jack Magruder, stringer for the Gazette-Times:
"I don't want to take anything away from (ASU) - that's a really good team," Robinson said.
"We were playing with our game plan (early), but they made a couple of stops and we got frustrated and make it into a three-point shooting game, and that's just not what we are. We're sort of a grind-em-out, get-good-shots type of team.
"When you play that way, you can't beat a good team. Our guys know it. It got away from us a little bit. You can't let that kind of stuff happen if we want to beat good teams. We started settling for threes, which is what that match-up zone is made for."
Cliff Kirkpatrick had a chance to chat with Omari Johnson following the game, an interview that produced this quote:
Are you guys still stunned from a rough game with Arizona State?
"The game wasn't that tough. We just weren't making shots. We had the open looks. But don't get me wrong, they played well, too."
Oregon State will look to redeem themselves this afternoon against Arizona.
Tipoff is scheduled for 1:00 PM on FSN.