Nightmares Can Finally Turn To Hoop Dreams
Nightmares? You bet Donminic Ellison had some nightmares about the Arizona game.
If you were in his Reeboks, wouldn’t you?
Heck, maybe you share an office or a loading dock with a true Coug or two. How was their productivity the morning after Washington State’s bizarre and incredible loss Thursday night? Spotty? Or flat worthless? And it’s not as if they missed any free throws. They only watched the horror.
You can imagine, then, how the 36 hours before Saturday’s date with Arizona State crawled past for Ellison.
So Ellison and the Cougars exorcised some demons as well as some Devils in outlasting ASU 84-71 at Friel Court, but don’t you dare suggest that some sort of psychological weight has been lifted.
“The weight won’t be off until we finish at Cal, our last game,” insisted Ellison after a career-high 30-point performance.
“This isn’t a ‘relief’ game. It’s not a surprise to us. It’s just another game we knew we could win and probably had to win.”
He’s talking as if the Cougars still have a future beyond next Saturday, and perhaps they do. The best-face-forward theory is that a sweep in the Bay Area gives Wazzu an excuse to watch CBS on Selection Sunday. It would leave the Cougars 11-7 in the conference standings and ahead of Stanford, and possibly Oregon, in the most distinguished season of Pac-10 play in a decade.
The ugly reality? The NCAA has never picked more than four Pac-10 teams for its prom - and since extending invites to more than just the league champ, has left eight 11-7 or 12-6 teams to vent spleen in the NIT.
There you have it.
Besides, there was a good deal more at stake Saturday than being the 11th seed in the Southeast Regional.
Whatever slant you have on Thursday’s trauma and the see-your-reflection licking the zebes gave Lute Olson’s loafers, the troublesome bottom line was that another made free throw by Isaac Fontaine with 1.1 second left in regulation or one by Ellison with 1.9 remaining in the first overtime makes the Cougars jubilant winners.
It was for that reason that Cougar coach Kevin Eastman told his team before playing ASU that “if the game gets down to the wire, I hope it’s Ike or Dom on the free-throw line so they can prove to any doubters they can hit a big free throw.”
Actually, there were 39 big free throws and the Cougars made 30 - 19 more than the Sun Devils, who saw three players foul out and two more on the verge. Consider this the Pac-10’s makeup call for Thursday’s transgressions.
ASU coach Bill Frieder, continuing his high-class romance with Pullman, booked a 3:50 flight out of town and declined to make himself or his players available for comment - other than to threaten the shot clock operator with a butt-booting for being slow on the trigger once late in the game.
The Sun Devils trailed just 71-69 at the time and had the Cougars down to :05 on the shot clock with the ball out of bounds. It was still :03 when Ellison let fly with a 3 that may have been the game’s biggest bucket.
It certainly was for Ellison.
“I probably didn’t forget the missed free throws (from Thursday night) until I hit the buzzer-beater,” he said. “They’d been on my mind all day, all night. It really hit me when I was about to shoot my first free throw today.”
In the context of a basketball game, what happened to Ellison against Arizona is the worst feeling a player can have. By the time the second overtime ended, it was a quarter to 12. Ellison shlepped himself home by 1 a.m., and 5 minutes after he got through the door the phone rang.
It was Mom and Dad.
“They said, ‘Great game,”’ he remembered. “And my mom told me that ‘if it was meant to be, it was meant to be. Maybe it wasn’t mean to happen to make two free throws to win the game. Life doesn’t stop. You’ll have a big game on Saturday.’
“Thank God for parents, huh?”
The phone call helped Ellison sleep Thursday night, though not before he “pulled the covers up over my head and screamed a little inside.”
The Friel faithful left most of their screams inside Saturday, too. Perhaps just as spent at the Cougars and certainly chagrined by the technical foul for throwing debris on Thursday, the 7,533 game-goers were subdued, to say the least.
When they did get with it, it was largely due to Ellison’s offense. Yes, he had six of WSU’s 23 turnovers, but he also had virtually every swing basket - and he made 5 of 6 free throws in the last 1:02.
“We didn’t panic, which was good,” said teammate Mark Hendrickson. “We made some smart plays and free throws down the stretch, which is a tribute to our point guard.”
Tribute nothing. It was his ticket to a good night’s sleep.
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review