Sun Devils Pay the Piper with Mistakes in Loss to Stanford
LAS VEGAS -- The Arizona State Sun Devils continually rolled the dice on their free-throw shooting down the stretch of the season, as the city known for giving and taking its fair share of luck saw ASU roll one too many times in the first round of the Pac-12 tournament.
"It is (disappointing) because you'll always wonder and play the 'what if?' game. I thought we really played well. It was our best shooting game of the season from three. We did a lot of nice things," said head coach Bobby Hurley following the game.
"We’ve hung our hat on the paint, and we got doubled up 32 to 16. (We) just didn’t close the game out the way you have to. You can’t afford to play with that kind of effort defensively and that’s not who we’ve been, certainly not the last few weeks. It’s tough."
Arizona State found themselves up by 14 points with 3:01 remaining in what looked to be a sure-fire win over the Stanford Cardinal, a team the Sun Devils had handled in Tempe just last week.
Arizona State forward Kimani Lawrence finished a dunk through contact and was set to hit the free-throw line following a timeout. ASU's bench was alive and electric, as a big date with rival Arizona was on deck for the second round.
By all accounts, the opening game of the Pac-12 tournament was over.
However, the Cardinal would go on a 16-1 run over the final 2:45 to upset Arizona State and send ASU packing earlier than anticipated. The Sun Devils missed both shot attempts taken after the 3:01 mark and made only one of five free throws attempted to finish the game.
Stanford won the game on a buzzer-beater after trailing by as many as 17 during the game.
“We were doing things very uncharacteristic of really what we’ve been doing the last few weeks and you pay for it. It’s tough. It’s tough for my kids. They’ve really been playing well the last few weeks and I thought we had controlled the game for most of the game and played a winning game. We just didn’t finish it," Hurley said.
"Now you’ve got to pay the price for it.”
That price is now steep, as a nice run in the Pac-12 tournament would have put Arizona State in contention for a possible final seed in the NCAA tournament considering their hot form entering this week.
All of the momentum built by the Sun Devils over the last few weeks is now erased.
"I felt like we lost focus after Kimani (Lawrence) got that big dunk. We just never bounced back from that. We were missing free throws, turning it over, wasn't rebounding. That'll lose you the game," said guard Jay Heath in his postgame press conference.
Lawrence chimed in and said he felt Arizona State "playing the score" rather than finishing the game like the Sun Devils had done so well recently.
The Cardinal grabbed four offensive rebounds in the final three minutes and made all three shot attempts in the final minute of play. Arizona State turned the ball over twice in the final 2:33.
Despite the monumental momentum shift going against his team, Hurley said he never lost hope in his guys by adding, "We had worked to get the lead we had and yes, things were unraveling. It was hard to point to one area they were unraveling because it was (a collection of) turnovers, missed free throws, we weren’t getting stops anymore, we weren’t guarding the line, we were putting them on the line, we were giving up offensive rebounds. So it was a complete kind of breakdown . . . It was tough to see that happen and it cost us."
The month of March reveals precisely what your team is made of. Although Arizona State had flashed a glimmer of potential as to what they could achieve, it was ultimately the mistakes that haunted ASU quietly throughout the season that brought them back down to earth.