Is There Still Time For 8-7 Cougars To Salvage Season?

In this clime, the window of opportunity is not open for long.

When it gets cold, it gets shut - and maybe that’s as good a synopsis as any for the ongoing calamity of Washington State’s basketball season.

Expected to challenge for the Pacific-10 Conference championship, the Cougars lead the league only in extenuating circumstances.

Injuries. Personal tragedies. The treacherous slopes of the high moral ground.

Not to mention all those jump shots which just didn’t fall.

The upshot (downshot?) is a 1-6 bellyflop in Pac-10 play, which will be half past come Saturday night. The 8-7 Cougars find themselves in a basement bunk bed with Oregon State, the conference’s one truly dismal team and - not coincidentally - the only one WSU has been able to beat.

The Cougar fan can live with mediocrity - most years, he’s had no choice. But no one much likes to be teased. It’s why Mike Price’s November record in football is more than a media fascination, and it’s why there’s considerable public bellyaching now.

This was supposed to be the big payoff at the end of a pretty good Cougar run: 91 victories over the past five seasons. Closer inspection would reveal a third of those victories coming at the expense of some of college hoops’ real humpties, but no matter - this team had the makings. And the Cougar fan frets that the mix might not be this good for a spell.

It’s reasonable to assume the Cougs must win nine of their last 11 Pac-10 games to fulfill the promise the season once held. That’s not a particularly reasonable goal. Even so, Kevin Eastman refuses to speak of the season in the past tense, but of course that’s his job.

“We need a couple of wins,” said WSU’s second-year coach. “I don’t know if one win gets you over the hump.

“We’ve had some tough breaks this year and we haven’t been able to rebound from them. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to stop trying just because someone else doesn’t think we can do it.”

They’ll try again this weekend in Arizona, a predictably daunting assignment. Arizona State, Thursday’s opponent, just pulled itself into a lifeboat after an 0-5 Pac-10 start. And Arizona has only beaten WSU the last 20 times they’ve played.

Eastman hit on this team’s single biggest failing - that inability to simply overcome. Good teams do (and great teams have more bench than Wazzu), though you can certainly argue that the Cougs have been given the Job treatment.

More mysterious has been WSU’s other major failing.

Washington State was the best shooting college basketball team in the land a year ago - 51.7 percent, a shade better than UCLA. Only six times in 27 did the Cougars make less than 50 percent of their shots, and only twice under 40.

These Cougars are shooting a painfully ordinary 45.5 percent - painful because they have not been great stoppers on defense.

Only five times in 15 games has WSU shot better than 50 percent - and only once in the Pac-10.

The mystery is that this is virtually the identical cast which had such good aim a year ago - the caveat being that forward Mark Hendrickson, the hub of all things offensive, sat for the first six Pac-10 games with a broken hand.

He’s back, but the perimeter offense isn’t.

“As Mark gets back into the swing of things, people will have to double our post some,” Eastman said. “Cal chose not to and Mark goes for 27 points against them. Stanford doubled a little more than teams have in the past and they doubled from the other block, something this group hasn’t seen.

“And we quick-shot it a couple of times, and that’s something probably created when we were going through that frustrating period without Mark and Donminic (Ellison) and a competitive guy is saying to himself, ‘I’m going to shoot us out of this slump.’ It doesn’t work that way.”

But the Cougars weren’t shooting it all that well before Hendrickson got hurt. Now it’s wide-open looks and even breakaway layups that are rolling off.

The players may not acknowledge it, but Eastman does: these guys are human, and their confidence is shot.

“They’re shooting with a little question mark as it’s going up,” he said.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how it could have turned out differently. At Arizona, for instance, the Wildcats have survived quite impressively without center Joseph Blair, an academic casualty at the semester break.

“Losing Blair was a blow for them,” Eastman said, “but then they came back with the UCLA victory which propelled them on to say, ‘Hey, we can play without this guy.’

“We almost got that - and who knows what might have happened if we’d beaten UCLA (without Hendrickson)?” Eastman said. “As crazy as it sounds now, you’re on a completely different confidence level.”

About that point, Eastman caught himself. “Coulda, woulda, shoulda,” he said. “Ifs and all that.”

He said it believing the window to be open still, if only a crack.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review