Cats Chase The Dawgs Win Far From Average

It is best not to confuse justice with the law, especially the law of averages.

Still, you might figure the system owed Washington State one.

Those who follow Cougars basketball at all - a somewhat desperate pastime of late - know last-second disappointment like the back of fate’s hand. Six games in 1998 came down to the final possession and six times the Cougars came away losers. We see them still - Chris Crosby’s 10-footer clanking off against Eastern Washington, Carlos Daniel’s 17-footer missing at the buzzer against Arizona State, the three shots which failed in the final 11 seconds at USC, UCLA’s Kris Johnson’s arrogant 3 over Will Hutchens with three-tenths of a second remaining.

Truly, the last-at-bat whiff is as endemic to the Kevin Eastman era at Wazzu as the talent drain. Fifteen games dating back to 1995 have been last-possession affairs; only twice did the Cougs win - once when an Oregon State shot missed that year, and once in 1997 when Carlos Daniel’s layup beat Cal.

So here’s to better luck - and, possibly, to a better team than we might have imagined.

For the time being, the Cougs have earned the benefit of our many doubts.

No, they will not break into any Top 25s for beating rival Washington 72-71 on Jan-Michael Thomas’ 3-pointer Sunday.

At this point, however, the Top 125 looks pretty good.

“It’s nice to be rewarded,” said Eastman, “in a game that I’m sure most people out there felt we could not win.”

Could not or should not, whatever. Not was the operative adverb.

That was as close to neener-neener as Eastman would allow himself. His team and program have been analyzed thoroughly in the past year, analysis that has been both worthy and timely. But, inevitably, discussion of what the Cougars haven’t done or can’t do tends to drown out whispers of what they can.

They can - and do routinely - play hard. They can shoot it well enough to make them dangerous. And they have the dubious ability to make good teams look average, bad teams look good - and average teams look to the heavens and bellow.

“We’re pests,” Eastman shrugged.

Make no mistake, Washington is very average at the moment. And the Huskies violated the law of average teams by keeping the Cougars close - with 24 turnovers and 14 missed free throws and scads of missed layups - and remaining vulnerable to something like Thomas’ clutch shot.

From the roster that reached the NCAA’s Sweet 16 last March, the Huskies lost just a backup center and a five-point-a-game point guard, virtual trifles. But the sum of these parts are considerably less. The two young point guards they have figure to be fine in time, but they’re borderline horrible now. When center Todd MacCulloch isn’t in the game - and he was never really in it Sunday - the Dawgs have neither much size nor much identity. Deon Luton did his best to compensate with a 23-point afternoon, but in the last 7-1/2 minutes when the Huskies went without a field goal the 6-foot-5 junior barely touched the ball - even when guarded by the 5-10 Thomas.

The MacCulloch issue was fundamental, fouls limiting the Husky edifice to just 10 unproductive minutes.

“I did a poor job of managing,” said UW coach Bob Bender, “seeing that he didn’t pick up a couple of the early fouls. I let my team down and that can’t happen again.”

He may have been out of practice. It was the first time Big Mac had fouled out in 49 games; he’d only been whistled for 16 fouls in 308 minutes this year.

But Eastman’s “management,” if you will, of the same matter was impeccable. He started Steve Slotemaker at center in hopes MacCulloch would opt not to shadow a pretty fair perimeter shooter outside; instead, MacCulloch was assigned 6-5 Kojo Mensah-Bonsu, and the results were even worse.

“We wanted to put a shooter on the floor rather than Eddie Miller or Leif (Nelson) or Brian Stewart,” Eastman explained. “We wanted to bring him away. We felt there were certain ways we could get fouls on him and one of them was not taking it right at him on the block. He doesn’t foul a whole lot, if you watch film, if you take it right at him. If he has to come out and defend some, it changes things.”

Speaking of changes, have the Cougars changed any perceptions?

Too early to call.

“We’re not going to be run over,” insisted Thomas, who never balked on his winning bucket even though it would be his only one. “If you want to win against us, you’re going to have to come out and play hard.

“Teams are probably looking at us like we’re an easy game, like they don’t have to get up for us. But if you don’t get up for us, you’re probably going to be in for a rude awakening. It doesn’t matter what happened last year. It’s a whole new ballgame, a whole new season.”

A whole new concept, too, this winning on the last shot. Makes it more fun when that’s the final analysis.

You can contact John Blanchette by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5509.