Pac-12 Tourney: WSU beats Cal 69-52

Same script as many of the other losses brings an end to a lost season

Monty Bowser scored a career high 19 points in the loss. Photo courtesy AI Powers/Pac-12 Media

Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

Both teams get off to a slow start, with no rhythm on either side. Cal is hustling, but not being effective on the offensive end. Five minutes into the game, WSU has a 7-3 lead.

Cal settles for 3-point attempts as they move the ball around the perimeter and do not force it inside or attack the basket. Nothing is falling. Washington State is steady but effective. By the 4-minute mark, the Cougars holds a 27-13 lead.

Kuany Kuany has a nice spurt, and scores 6 points in the last 2 minutes of the half. Cal also give up a couple of open 3-pointers to WSU’s Jabe Mullins. WSU leads 35-21 at the half.

The second half starts. Cal has a bit more energy and start attacking the lane more. Joel Brown has a couple nice drives and finishes at the basket, but Cal can’t come up with enough defensive stops. WSU maintains their 15-ish point lead, and is up 45-29 at the 16-minute mark.

Cal goes a little faster, and begins intermittently pressing. Monty Bowser has 8 points, and ND Okafor has a nice finish - a run of 10 straight points for Cal. WSU calls a timeout, up 52-43 with just over 6 minutes left. There is a small window for Cal to make an unlikely comeback.

Washington State steadies themselves coming out of the timeout. They score 5 straight points and push the lead back up to 16. Cal never gets closer than 12 the rest of the way, and WSU wins 69-52.

It’s the same story for many games this season. Cal is inefficient on the offensive end for much of the game. There is a brief flourish of activity when they go up-tempo because of the deficit or the roster at that moment, and it gets interesting for a couple minutes. Against teams like ASU and UW, the late flourish of activity is enough to tie the game and have a good chance at earning the win. Against better coached or more disciplined teams like WSU, Cal’s efforts are refuted easily enough and Cal loses by double digits.

This is the way the Mark Fox era ends. All season long, Cal had a repeatable, losing game script with no meaningful adjustments. When adjustments are made, the games get mildly interesting and entertaining. In the postgame press conference, I asked if he considered going uptempo earlier in the game as it was effective in the second half when the game was already effectively over. His response;

”It’s something we talked about, we just have no depth.”

“You’re going to need more bodies when you extend yourselves like that for an extended period of time. We talked about it though, and at the end when we did it, it was effective.”

In today’s game, DeJuan Clayton was inactive and Grant Newell was a game-time decision who did not play due to illness. Cal had 8 rotational players to work with (Joel Brown, Monty Bowser, Sam Alijiki, Marsalis Roberson, Kuany Kuany, Obinna Anyanwu, Lars Thiemann, ND Okafor). All of them played over 10 minutes tonight.

By his own admission, Coach Fox indicated that the press and pressure were effective, but they can’t do it more because of roster challenges. My criticism all season long: why not give it a try. Even missing several players, the roster is still full of length and speed to extend the defense more than they did. In a lost season, the worst mistake is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result.

And so we enter an offseason of transition, most likely. Let’s hope this offseason follows a more optimistic script for the program, its players, and for Cal fans.