As I wrote in our story from yesterday's game, Washington State's offense simply wasn't working yesterday. The quickest way to beat a zone defense is by shooting well from the perimeter and the Cougars had one of their worst shooting days of the season.

Brett Boese sparked the Cougars early with a quick eight points, but those early eight points made him WSU's leading scorer for about the next hour because it was just that kind of day for the Cougars.

Ultimately, the loss hurts because OSU is a team that does not have more talent than WSU, even if the Beavers pose some matchup problems for the Cougars. Missing the opportunity to go 4-1 in Pac-12 play heading into what could easily be the toughest road swing this year for the Cougars is bad, but as long as the dismal shooting is an aberration it's still just one loss.

If WSU can steal one next week from Colorado or Utah on the road they will still emerge from the first third of their conference schedule with a winning Pac-12 record.

What could hurt really WSU, however, is if the Beavers provided a prescription for how to beat the Cougars that other teams can make use of. WSU's ball movement and ability to share the ball has been impressive in recent weeks, and the Cougars got open looks from the outside against OSU by passing around the perimeter or passing inside and kicking to the opposite wing.

But at times the Cougars appeared to be over-passing and playing into OSU's hands by slowing the game down in their ongoing search for a better shot.

WSU isn't likely to shoot as poorly as it did against OSU often, but it also probably isn't going to make almost everything like the Cougars did in wins over Washington and Oregon.

Some noteworthy stats:

-- DaVonte Lacy made two 3-pointers, tying him with Derrick Low (2005-08) for 20^th on WSU's career 3-point list.

-- Boese has now scored eight or more points in three consecutive games.

-- WSU's 16 first-half points are WSU's second fewest this year. The Cougars had 12 first-half points against UC Santa Barbara.

A few extra quotes:

OSU coach Wayne Tinkle, a Ferris High graduate:

" It was fun. As a player I never played very well when I came back close to home and it was neat for our guys for a lot of reasons."

WSU guard DaVonté Lacy:

"As a team they were very long, every time we were about to take a shot they were right there."

WSU coach Ernie Kent:

"First of all I want to say that I thought our crowd the last two games was just fantastic."

"DaVonte tried to get us going, he was banged up from the Oregon game. We didn't know how much he would be able to go and he did a good job of gutting himself through it and trying to push himself through it."

"To start the game we went right inside to Jordan Railey and his shot got block, we went back to Dex and had a layup that was missed.  We didn't get a lot done inside to start the game and we started settling for jump shots and obviously that was working either because we were missing shots."

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