The ASU women’s basketball team is certainly getting used to games that come down to the wire.

And for the second consecutive contest, the Sun Devils found a way to come out on the winning end of a nail-biter.

ASU forced overtime on a put-back layup by sophomore forward Kimberly Brandon with 55 seconds left in regulation and then used its free throws to pull away in the extra period and beat Washington 67-61 Thursday night at Wells Fargo Arena.

“Well, the ‘Cardiac Kids’ strike again,” ASU coach Charli Turner Thorne said. “We are giving people their money’s worth. February is not about pretty basketball — it’s about winning any way you can. Our end-of-the-game defense is getting better, and [we were] hitting our free throws down the stretch, so this is only going to help us.”

The win was the Sun Devils’ sixth in their last seven games, as well as their 11th victory over UW in the team’s last 12 contests.

After the Huskies grabbed a 55-53 lead with 1:25 remaining, the Sun Devils came back to tie when Brandon got the offensive board off of a missed jumper by junior forward Becca Tobin and laid it back in with 55 seconds to play.

Each team had one more chance with the ball, but junior UW senior center Laura McLellan and ASU junior guard Tenaya Watson each missed jumpers, and the game went to the extra frame.

ASU never trailed during bonus basketball and took control for good when senior forward Kayli Murphy grabbed two offensive rebounds on one possession and hit a pair of free throws to give the Sun Devils a 63-59 advantage with 41 seconds to play.

Those two freebies were two of Murphy’s career-high 16 points. She also grabbed 11 rebounds to record her third career double-double.

“She really put us on her shoulders tonight,” Turner Thorne said of Murphy. “It wasn’t just her scoring and her rebounding — she’s like a one-woman help side on defense. She’s guarding her player and somebody else’s player almost every possession, if you watch her. She was unbelievable.”

The Sun Devils out-rebounded the Huskies 34-24, including a 17-6 edge on the offensive glass, which kept possessions alive down the stretch.

“We definitely came in this game with more of a focus [on rebounding], because they out-rebounded us the first time we saw them,” Murphy said. “We knew we had to lock down and rebound.”

The Sun Devils (14-7, 6-4 Pac-10) led 33-22 at halftime but struggled offensively after intermission to allow UW to creep back into the game. ASU made just seven of its 21 shots in the second half and did not hit a 3-pointer the entire game (0-of-9).

“It’s hard when you shoot [0-for-9] from the 3-point line, because then they just sag [on defense],” ASU senior guard Danielle Orsillo said. “It’s hard to get the ball inside, which was our game plan. They weren’t even playing [defense on] some of our people up top, so that makes it really hard to get those high-percentage inside shots.”

The Huskies (9-11, 4-6 Pac-10) made their first move in the second half when a layup by McLellan capped an 8-0 spurt to slash ASU’s lead to 38-37 with 12:09 left.

UW then kept it a one-possession game until taking its first lead of the contest at 49-48 on another layup by McLellan with four minutes to play in regulation.

Orsillo had 13 points and six assists for ASU, while Brandon added 10 points.

McLellan came off the bench to score a game-high 18 points and also contributed six rebounds. ASU held UW’s leading scorer, senior guard Sami Whitcomb, to just 10 points, with six of them coming on free throws.

Reach the reporter at gina.mizell@asu.edu