Blanchette: WSU navigates toward its identity

PULLMAN – Manning the tiller, Tony Bennett will not pick a wave and navigate by that, knowing it’s merely a passage to being lost at sea.

Or how is it that he put it Thursday night?

“You can’t focus too much on what our record is,” he insisted.

Problem is, such an accounting cannot be forever postponed. Something or someone – computer or committee – will do a reckoning soon enough. And if there is not enough bottom-line substance to what the Washington State Cougars have achieved, then the basketball season will sail on without them – which seemed to be happening here against UCLA, and without much resistance.

Then Bennett the coach broke bad with his players during a testy second-half timeout and the Cougars found the stomach to claw back from a 15-point deficit to dead even with 5 minutes to play, with the nation’s 13th-ranked team poised to tip over for the second time in a week.

And then the Cougs lost anyway.

Which, alas, is the natural order of things in what may be the most dramatic one-sided series in college basketball.

In 20 years of meetings between the Bruins and Cougars at Friel Court, Wazzu has won exactly once – but 11 of the 19 losses have come by five or fewer points, some goosed along by the most bizarre events and sideshow officiating imaginable. UCLA’s 61-59 escape this time joins that collection – not just for the big lead the Bruins blew, but the footnote of a first-half basket-by-accident when Darren Collison’s rocket pass to the rim was somehow dinked in volleyball style by James Keefe.

“A lucky shot,” Collison said. “And we won by, what, two points?”

Exactly two.

The same amount the Cougars lost by, a difference you could chalk up to Taylor Rochestie – inbounding the ball on the baseline with 4.4 seconds left – not seeing teammate Caleb Forrest alone under the basket.

Also lucky. But bad luck.

It’s getting on to be time for the Cougars to find some of the good.

Unlike the last three UCLA teams that came up just short of a national championship, these Bruins do not have Final Four written all over them. Four seed, perhaps. But their credentials are more than impressive enough that beating them would be a resume builder that the Cougars do not yet have.

They have played five teams this season that have spent time in the Top 25, and lost to each of them. For the time being, their best victories are at home against Stanford – 43rd in the latest Ratings Percentage Index – and Mississippi State (87th) on a neutral floor. This is not a shortcut to the thrills of March, if the Cougars have designs on being a part of that for the third year in a row.

There are more opportunities ahead, but Bennett prefers a broader view.

“When you focus only on (winning), you get in trouble,” he said. “You have to keep producing, getting better. We’re on that edge where you could look at our record and say you could easily not have a win in the Pac-10, or maybe one win – and that’s realistic. Then you look at a couple – maybe the Cal game, or this one – and see something else.

“But whoever we are, let’s be the best we can be.”

If the crippling lapses that have cost the Cougars in their seven losses haven’t driven that home, perhaps the comeback against the Bruins will. It certainly showcased the best the Cougars can do – nervy offense and bedrock defense – and brought to the fore the unprepossessing Caleb Forrest, whose 19 points were a revelation, but not necessarily Bennett’s point of pride.

“He’s got heart, he’s a tough kid and he knows who he is as a player,” Bennett said. “I hope our young kids take note of that, because that’s what’s required here to play at Washington State and he brings it.”

“Knowing who they are,” is Bennett’s big message at the moment, directed mostly at the three freshmen – Klay Thompson, Marcus Capers and DeAngelo Casto – who have cracked the rotation, and who were all part of the Thursday comeback.

And as much as the Cougars rely on Rochestie and Forrest and center Aron Baynes to lead and deliver, what they become this year will likely be decided by those youngsters – who all likely came from high school programs where “slippages,” as Bennett calls them, could quickly be made up with spurts and flurries the Cougars just don’t have in their arsenal.

“So they have to decide who they are,” Bennett contended.

“If we’re a tournament-caliber team, let’s be the best we can be. If it’s not that, then let’s play good basketball. My dad always said, ‘If all you can be is a C student, then be the best C student you can be.’ ”

Even if that’s a pretty abstract concept for a computer and a committee.