Cal Basketball: Utah Sticks Bears With Their Third Straight 20-Loss Season

The Utes open the second half with a 12-1 run, Cal can't recover in 61-46 loss.

Utah outscored Cal 12-1 over the first 6 minutes of the second half, breaking open a competitive game on the way to a 61-46 victory at Salt Lake City on Sunday afternoon.

The Bears (3-20, 2-10 Pac-12) remain winless in eight road games this season and have lost at least 20 games for the third straight season. No Pac-12 team in history had previously done that.

Cal has lost six in a row and five straight to the Utes.

Cal also failed to reach 50 points for the fourth straight game, the first time that’s happened to a Bears team since the 1948-49 season — 74 years ago.

The Bears have been offensively challenged all season, and once again played without guard DeJuan Clayton, listed as sidelined due to illness. Guard Devin Askew is out for the season after undergoing surgery last week for a sports hernia.

It gets no easier for Cal, which plays host to No. 5 Arizona (21-3, 10-3) on Thursday night at Haas Pavilion. The Wildcats average 83.3 points, eighth-best in the country.

“Hopefully, we can get somebody healthy. I’d love to get DeJuan back,” coach Mark Fox said on his post-game radio show.

The Bears have shifted forward Kuany Kuany to shooting guard and moved Sam Alajiki to small forward in an attempt to generate offense and fill vacancies.

“We’re a little disjointed. Our best playmakers aren’t on the floor,” Fox said. “Until we can get somebody back we’re going to have to try to be elite defensively.”

The Bears kept the game close in the first half, leading by as many as six points early in the game before falling behind 29-24 at the break. “We hoped to make it a defensive battle, which in the first half we did,” Fox said.

Cal limited the Utes to 34 percent in the first, including 4 for 17 on 3’s.

But Cal missed its first eight shots of the second half, and the Utes (16-9, 9-5) used a 12-1 start to the period to extend out to a 41-25 lead. The Bears got no closer than 12 points the rest of the way and Utah led by as any as 20.

“We had a very poor start to the second half for sure. You've got to be able to make some plays,” said Fox, whose team shot 34 percent for the game, 29 percent in the second half. “Offensively, we just don’t have enough playmaking on the floor. We only allowed them 61 points, but we’re putting so much pressure on our defense because of our inability to score.”

Center Lars Thiemann led Cal with 12 points and Kuany had 11 to go with a team-high seven rebounds.

Point guard Lazar Stefanovic, who scored a career-high 26 points in the Utes’ loss to Stanford on Thursday, followed that with 15 points and six assists. Big man Branden Carson had 12 points, 13 rebounds and four blocks.

Cover photo of Cal's Obinna Anyanwu by Jeffrey Swinger, USA Today

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