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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

TCU sends Cougs to another lopsided loss

Andy Friedlander Special to The Spokesman-Review
FORT WORTH, Texas – It’s 1,900 miles from Pullman to Fort Worth. To the Washington State men’s basketball team, it only feels like the Cougars traveled a million miles this week. After a long, rough, ugly road trip deep into the heart of Texas, the Cougars are headed home beaten, battered and looking for answers in the wake of their second consecutive beatdown, this one an 81-54 thrashing by TCU on Monday night at the Wilkerson-Greines Athletic Center. “I’ve been doing this a long time, and this is the toughest opening stretch I’ve ever dealt with,” said WSU coach Ernie Kent, in his first year with the Cougars but a veteran of 19 seasons as a college head coach. “Having to take a team where you’re teaching them so much new stuff and go on the road like this. But you can’t make excuses. You’ve got to get the job done.” The Cougars (0-2), who opened with a 65-52 loss at UTEP on Friday, didn’t come close to getting the job done against the Horned Frogs (2-0). They seemed lost from the opening tip, turning the ball over on their first two possessions and missing their first five shots while TCU made 7 of 8. Seemingly before they could blink, the Cougars trailed 14-0. And that was pretty much the ballgame. Oh, WSU hit a few shots and managed a few runs, closing the margin to seven when DaVonte Lacy’s off-balance baseline 3-pointer made it 21-14 with 9:41 left in the first half. But the Horned Frogs reeled off nine consecutive points and pulled away to a 45-26 halftime lead. The Cougars never got closer than 14 points in the second half and trailed by 33 with nine minutes to go. “This game was about competing,” Kent said. “That’s why I’m going to look at the tape before I comment too much more on that. I want to see if we competed. … We let this game get away from us, but you can still compete.” The Cougars suffered from the same maladies that doomed them against UTEP – poor shooting and no rebounding. Josh Hawkinson recorded 13 boards as the Cougars were outrebounded 45-37, but it wasn’t really that close. WSU allowed 18 offensive rebounds, and at one point TCU was outrebounding WSU 13-2. Kent called it the one “glaring” issue he took from the rout. “We certainly are giving people tape to look at, and people are going to pound the glass until we can get that piece figured out,” the coach said. “That’s a toughness thing; it’s a blocking-out thing, it’s an accountability thing that we’re going to have to get a lot better at.” As for the shooting, WSU shot 35 percent and its top two scorers, Lacy (11 points) and Hawkinson (14), combined to hit just 9 of 25. The Cougars also shot a horrid 39 percent from the foul line, missing their first nine free throws of the second half. “I really think we’re a good shooting team,” said Lacy, who is 6 of 22 so far this season. “It’s just shots aren’t falling. I think going back home is going to help us, getting in our own gym and getting some shots up. I think we all need to get back in the gym and just work on our own.”