WSU’s season ends with 74-68 loss to Portland in WCC Tournament second round
LAS VEGAS – The easiest basket of ND Okafor’s life came with about nine minutes to play in Washington State’s first conference tournament game. The Cougars’ power forward set a screen for freshman guard Ace Glass, who was hedged hard by Portland, the WCC Tournament’s No. 9 seed looking to send the Cougars home.
Somehow, Glass wrapped the pass around the double team and delivered it to Okafor, who saw nobody between him and the basket. So he caught the ball, took one step toward the basket and slammed it home, trimming WSU’s deficit to one at the Orleans Arena.
While that basket came easy, few others did for the Cougars, costing them a season-ending 73-68 loss to the Pilots, who took coach David Riley’s team out of offensive rhythm long enough to secure the victory.
“We’ve gotta become a tougher team defensively, we’ve gotta be a tougher team offensively that can withstand some of those shooting droughts we have,” Riley said. “There’s just a lot of factors that go into that consistency that we need to play at this level, and you saw flashes of it at different times. We have a great group of young men, but there’s some clear things that, when I look back at this season, we could’ve done a better job in.”
WSU, whose season ends with a 12-20 record in the WCC Tournament’s second round, spent much of the game trailing in large part because its offense vanished at the wrong time. For the game, the Cougars shot only 38% from the field and 9 of 31 from beyond the arc, their struggles away from Pullman surfacing once again. Glass tallied a team-best 19 points for WSU, which couldn’t give him much help on that front.
In the second half, which Portland won to the tune of 49-39, the Pilots were too much. Guard Garrett Nuckolls poured in 23 points for Portland, which also got 17 from star guard Joel Foxwell and 11 from big man Jermaine Ballisager-Webb. Their team rarely struggled on offense in similar ways, shooting 47% from the field, including a sharp 55% in the second half.
“They came in and beat us in a lot of facets of the game,” Riley said. “It’s hard to beat a team three times and, unfortunately, they got us tonight in one that was really important.”
Mostly, Washington State just couldn’t score the way it has at other times in the season. One of the conference’s best marksmen, junior wing Ri Vavers managed only five points and missed all eight attempts from deep. Guard Jerone Morton, a crafty scorer, supplied 10 points. Forward Eemeli Yalaho scored 11 points (six in the final moments with the game out of reach), guard Tomas Thrastarson went for three points and forward Simon Hildebrandt, whose best attributes center around his catch-and-shoot game, was limited to six points on two triples.
WSU had a four-point lead at halftime. The Cougars shot only 35% from the floor, unable to find any consistent rhythm. They committed only four turnovers, a positive sign for a group that has often struggled in that department in each of the last two seasons, but they couldn’t find much in the way of offensive creation.
All told, for the Cougs, it was another loss in a familiar way. Headed into Friday’s game, WSU was 1-11 against Division I teams in games played outside of Washington. Riley’s bunch totaled only one true road win all season– against Portland in late December.
“On the road, we gotta learn how to play with composure, learn how to stick together,” Okafor said. “At home, we have all the confidence in the world. … When we’re in different environments and stuff, we’re not in our natural habitat and we struggled with that all year. That’s really what slowed us down, away games. We just have to learn to play with composure.”
How to make sense of Riley’s second season? The Cougs generated a few promising stretches, including two three-game winning streaks, and Glass looked like an ascendant star. An all-conference second-team pick, Glass became WSU’s best player in his freshman season, as the team relied on him for huge baskets in the biggest spots. Glass set the program’s freshman record for single-season scoring during Friday’s game, pushing his total on the year to 525 points.
“I had a really blessed freshman year,” Glass said. “I feel like I came in, earned my spot. (Riley) believed in me for the whole season. … We built a brotherhood and I’m happy I went to Washington State. I’m glad I’m here, and I’m just happy about the year. I feel like I learned a lot. I feel like the whole team learned a lot. We learned to push through ups and downs.”
But the blights will be remembered far more strongly for WSU, which started the season just 3-8 and spent the rest of the it climbing uphill. Like they were on Friday, the Cougars struggled mightily to close games, blowing big second-half leads to Oregon State, San Francisco, LMU, Pepperdine and others.
Looking ahead, the Cougs could once again be looking at an offseason of change. WSU has lost its entire starting five each of the past two seasons. Former head coach Kyle Smith’s departure in 2024, ushering in the Riley era, was largely to blame for the first .
What Washington State made clear on Friday was that in the first year of the re-imagined Pac-12, it will have to improve on the road.
“It was a disappointing season – not gonna hide from that,” Riley said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do as a program to get back on track, and we will. We absolutely will, but there’s a lot of love in that locker room. Those guys are great young men and I’m very proud of them for who they are, and we’re all gonna grow from this.”