After gaining momentum with back-to-backs conference wins for the first time this season, the ASU men’s basketball team entered Sunday hoping for some love on Valentine’s Day. Instead, the team left Wells Fargo Arena with broken hearts.
The Sun Devils (14-12, 4-9 Pac-12) fell to the UCLA Bruins 78-65 to end their brief two-game uptick. They shot just 39.3 percent from the floor in the second half and made fewer than half of their free throws.
ASU barely had a chance to get rolling before UCLA jumped ahead, as the Bruins exploded to a quick 9-3 lead less than five minutes in, aided by a bizarre turnover by junior forward Obinna Oleka which bounced off both him and senior forward Eric Jacobsen before going out of bounds in front of the Sun Devil bench.
“Our turnovers… some of them were unexplainable out there,” head coach Bobby Hurley said after the game. “In games like this, you can’t afford that to go on.”
In the first half, however, the offense was able to even out its successes with its failures, utilizing the 3-pointer more than it has most of the season.
Trailing 21-15 with just under 11 minutes gone in the first half, junior guard Andre Spight and senior forward Willie Atwood electrified the home crowd, sinking three consecutive 3s to sway momentum towards the Sun Devil bench.
The Sun Devils rode that momentum to halftime, trailing by two and feeling as though they were still in the game. But, all the shots that fell in the first 20 minutes did not in the second 20.
After sophomore guard Tra Holder put ASU ahead on the first possession of the second half, UCLA used the next 12 or so minutes to keep the Sun Devils at arm’s length.
ASU went through multiple cold spells with the score close, frustrating Hurley that his squad could not get over the hump, especially on its home floor.
“Any time we had a sniff of getting the game in a close margin, we refused to make free throws or layups or open 3s,” Hurley said. “It was a problem with our offense.”
Freshman guard Prince Ali buoyed his team with nine second half points off the bench and sophomore forward Jonah Bolden added a season-high 16 points to help put away ASU late.
The brief stretch of clarity from beyond the arc in the first half led to more and more long distance attempts for the Sun Devils with worse results. Overall, ASU made 12 of 27 3-point attempts with stretches of four and five missed in a row in the second half.
“I feel like we had a couple wide open layups that we usually make that didn’t go in,” sophomore guard Kodi Justice said. “Corner 3s, top of the key pick-and-rolls, the pop, open shots we usually hit just didn’t fall in the second half.”
A less-than-pleased Hurley said after the game that the high volume of 3-point shots came as a direct result of the lack of production in the paint, as ASU made fewer 2-pointers (10) than 3-pointers (12).
“If we made more layups, you wouldn’t see us shooting as many 3s,” Hurley said. “But when you see us miss the volume of layups we miss during the game, then you can see why we say, ‘hey, I’m going to let these guys shoot a few more 3s during the course of a game.’”
Instead of riding high into Tucson this week, ASU suffered another set-back looking at its biggest rivals, something Justice said was on the team’s mind and something they have to bounce back from.
“It’s really frustrating,” Justice said. “It feels like we can get our season back. We have this confidence going. We’re looking and we’re almost .500 and we can move to the middle of the pack and we’re right there and this could be a big game to set up for Wednesday. We just let ourselves down.”
Reach the reporter at mtonis@asu.edu or follow @Tonis_The_Tiger on Twitter.
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