Looking back at WSU’s win over Oregon

Indulge me for a second while I pastiche my favorite Aaron Sorkin soliloquy :

Offensive basketball when played almost perfectly is like music. It has rhythm and movement and pattern and harmony. These are the properties of music. And music has the ability to find us, and move us, and lift us up in ways that literal meaning can’t. Do you see?

Well-executed offense is music and yesterday’s game was 45 minutes of the opening stanzas of Baba O’Riley. At times the action was too quick to follow while trying to fire off a tweet or even simply mark a play in my notebook.

Just check out the sequence in this video captured by CougCenter’s Jeff Nusser. A Vine video can only last six seconds and that one includes WSU taking the ball out of the net after a make, inbounding it and scoring.

Washington State made 14 of 24 3-pointers, almost all of them were wide open and most seemed to come when a player passed up a good shot for a better one. It certainly helps that basically every player had a good shooting night – Que Johnson was the only nine players that saw the floor to shoot less than 50 percent, and he made 2 of 3 3-pointers – but regardless of how well WSU is shooting the ball movement and knowledge of a new offense is impressive.

— The defense, obviously, could be better. Kent said afterward that it wasn’t Jordan Railey’s type of game – because of all the running, I believe, and that he’s saying Railey is more suited to a half-court game like the Cougars played against California in which he excelled. But with Railey only playing 10 minutes the Cougars didn’t have anyone to protect the rim and UO’s Elgin Cook was able to score 26 points.

Joseph Young had a huge night with 32 points. WSU needs to get better at stopping high-level guards having now given up 29 or more points to Corey Hawkins, Nigel Williams-Goss and Young.

— WSU is now 2-0 in overtime games and has won three consecutive conference games that came down to the wire.

— Ike Iroegbu may not be playing point guard anymore but he is still WSU’s shot creator on fast breaks, which is how he tied for the team lead with five assists. The Cougars have run the break very well in these last two games and if they score on an initial cutter they do a good job of finding the trailing big man, like in the video above and on a pretty pass that led to a Junior Longrus dunk.

Here are some more stats from the game:

— Lacy now has 1,302 career points and ranks No. 13 on the all-time WSU scoring list, having passed Carlos Daniel and Derrick Low yesterday.

— Josh Hawkinson had his 10 ^th double-double of the season.

— WSU’s 57 first-half points were the most first-half points scored by the Cougars in at least 15 years, and probably a lot more.

— Brett Boese scored a career-high 16 points. He’s played 30-plus minutes in each of the last two games.

— WSU’s 3-1 Pac-12 start is the best since the Cougars went 4-1 during the 2007-08 season.

Let’s open up that quote book:

DaVonte Lacy:

“We’re being confident and calm. Coach always talks about not getting too high and not getting too low and I think we’ve done a good job of that besides the mishap at Cal but we bounced back from that and still won that game. But we’ve played two games and knocked down our free throws and taken care of the ball and that’s what good teams do.”

What’s really impressive about this team is we only have three seniors and all the young guys – these two (Josh Hawkinson and Ike Iroegbu) are sophomores and they’re playing with really high character and high confidence in late-game situations. I don’t know if we’ve had that in the past.

Coming into the game we knew how they were playing and they’re very similar to us – they like to run and stuff. So coming into the game it was kind of a joke like we’re going to put 100 up. That was like our motto, we’re running and we’re going to put 100 up. It was funny because right when we hit 100, I didn’t notice it, but I looked at the bench and it was like, ‘hey, we got a hundo.’

(How does your knee feel?)

It feels good. I wasn’t 100 percent, I wasn’t going to help my team out. If someone else was going to be 100 percent, I was probably like 85-90 percent but someone that was 100 percent was going to help the team better. It’s just a little stinger but I’ll be alright in the morning.

Ernie Kent:

This was about my basketball team and the next hurdle that we needed to overcome. They played really good on the road in conference play. They needed to come back home and handle all the adversity of playing at home and sometimes you think there is no adversity, there’s a lot of adversity because now you have classes, you have the students pack, you have people patting them on their back. You can really fall into a trap and not have them ready to go like you are on the road when we can keep them in hotel rooms, keep them together, keep them in walkthroughs. I was proud of the fact that they got themselves ready to play.

My staff did an outstanding job getting them ready to play with the scouts and everything and when you’re in an environment where you have to come down to the wire with a chance to win and don’t get it done and come back and play even better in the overtime, that’s pretty impressive.

It seems like with this team the bigger the stage, the better they’re starting to play and if that building continues to be on fire like that with the students coming back and the energy it provides and the energy from the community sitting behind my back, there’s so much more basketball in us and you’re seeing a team that’s really growing up before your eyes. It’s Washington State’s basketball team and it’s an honor and a privilege to coach them because that’s an excellent group of young men down there that have really bought in and believe.