Who Saw This Coming? Cal and Washington State Playing Good Basketball

Here’s a sentence I didn’t expect to write this season: The Cal men’s basketball team owns the second-longest current winning streak in the Pac-12 Conference.

OK, it’s just two games long, but for a team that began the season 0-12, these are big steps in the right direction.

Next challenge: Win on the road.

Winless in five games away from Haas Pavilion, the Bears (3-13, 2-3) will try to change that Wednesday night at Washington State (7-10, 2-4) in a matchup of two teams whose seasons have taken unlikely turns.

While Cal has won three of four and is coming off victories over Colorado and Stanford, the Cougars delivered the biggest surprise of the Pac-12 season on Saturday, building an 18-point lead against Arizona — at McKale Center — and pulling off the 74-61 upset victory.

It was WSU’s first-ever road victory over an opponent ranked in the top-5 of the AP Top-25 poll.

WSU coach Kyle Smith’s attention is now on the Bears. He is convinced that — as sophomore Sam Alajiki said after the Stanford win — this is not the same Cal team.

“Our analytics on the last four games (say) I think they’re playing like a top-15 team,” Smith says in the video at the top of this story. “That’s a small sample size, but it’s significant. I mean, Colorado’s good and they really dominated Colorado for most of that game. That probably gave them a lot of confidence.

“And, obviously, their rival, being able to get up 20-something against Stanford. I think they’re playing well and obviously . . . we’re playing pretty good, too.”

Smith is impressed by Cal coach Mark Fox’s ability to keep his players on the same page, even after an 0-12 start.

“When you’re talking about handling adversity, you’re tested, for sure. We’ve all had parts of our season when it went south . . . it’s always capable of losing your team. But they obviously haven’t. So kudos to them.

“You’ll usually see a team that breaks, they’ll wander off, they won’t execute. Coach Fox, he runs with a pretty tight rein both sides of the ball, and they’ve responded and now they’re having success.”

The key player, Smith said, is transfer guard DeJuan Clayton, who missed the team’s first 13 games with a hamstring injury. Clayton, who scored more than 1,500 points in four seasons at Coppin State, came alive with 26 points and six assists against Stanford.

“He’s in uncharted territory — a seventh-year guy. I’ve never seen a seventh-year guy. He’s a man amongst boys,” Smith said, alluding to Clayton’s five seasons at Coppin State and one injury-torpedoed year Hartford before his arrival in Berkeley.

“He looks really poised out there. He looks like a guard that can do a lot of things. He can dribble, pass, drive and shoot,” Smith said. “He has that confidence. Scoring 1,500 points, playing the game is not overwhelming to him.”

WSU has pointed its season in the right direction over the past four games as well, with wins over Arizona and USC, a one-point loss to UCLA and a six-point loss to Arizona State.

The team’s emerging star is 6-foot-11 sophomore Mouhamed Gueye, a native of Senegal, who had 24 points and 14 rebounds in the win at Arizona. He has seven double-doubles and is averaging 16.8 points and 11.0 rebounds over the past five games.

Among four double-figure scorers, Saint Mary’s transfer guard Jabe Mullins also has found a place at WSU. He leads the Pac-12 in 3-point accuracy at 51 percent and over the past four games is averaging 14.8 points on 58 percent from deep.

Cover photo of Cal guard DeJuan Clayton by D. Ross Cameron, USA Today

Follow Jeff Faraudo of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jefffaraudo

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