LAS VEGAS — After Arizona wrapped up the Pac-12 regular season title by three games over anyone else last weekend, coach Tommy Lloyd warned the Wildcats that things would be different this week in the Pac-12 Tournament.
Records — and momentum — can all get reset. It’s March, after all.
“You don’t start out the game 8-0 because you won a conference championship,” Lloyd said. “And the other team is hungry.”
Then, in the Pac-12 Tournament’s very first game Wednesday, Stanford showed everybody exactly how this sort of thing works.
Despite having lost seven of its previous eight games, Stanford knocked off previously red-hot ASU in one of the most improbable ways ever: By going on a 16-1 run over the final three minutes, capped by James Keefe’s buzzer-beating 10-foot bank shot, to knock off the Sun Devils 71-70.
The win moved Stanford (16-15) into a quarterfinal game against Arizona (28-3) on Thursday at 1 p.m., and sent the Sun Devils (14-17) home on a rough note after their 53.6% 3-point shooting helped them take leads of up to 17 points in the first half.
“We were a total mess for the last three minutes,” ASU coach Bobby Hurley said, as veteran Kimani Lawrence sat next to him fighting off tears. “That’s why we’re sitting here in disappointment.”
Over the final three minutes, ASU self-destructed by making only 1 of 4 free throws while turning the ball over twice and, finally, having standout forward Jalen Graham miss a turnaround hook shot with nine seconds left, giving Stanford time to win the game on its final shot.
“Things were unraveling and it was hard to point to one area,” Hurley said. “Because it was turnovers, it was missed free throws, we weren’t getting stops anymore, we were putting them on the line and we were giving up offensive rebounds. It was a complete breakdown.”
Maybe considering ASU’s season, though, it wasn’t that much of a surprise. No team in the Pac-12 other than Oregon State — which followed its Elite Eight appearance last season by finishing in last place this season — bounces between more extremes than the Sun Devils.
ASU lost eight of 10 Pac-12 games after New Year’s Day, including two double-digit losses to Arizona, before winning its last four games of the regular season — including an improbable sweep at Utah and Colorado that the Wildcats couldn’t even pull off.
But ASU has been one of the Pac-12’s worst-shooting teams, hitting just 29.6% of its 3-pointers in conference play, so when the Sun Devils were riding the 3 to double-digit leads Wednesday, it ultimately did not prove sustainable. Not when, as Hurley mentioned, just about everything else was breaking down.
“The 15 3s they made were in the first 30 minutes of the game,” Stanford coach Jerod Haase said. “I told our guys: ‘Just stay with the plan.’ You know, these things tend to balance out.”
Arizona State's Alonzo Gaffney holds his head after a play during Wednesday's Pac-12 Tournament loss to Stanford in Las Vegas.
So when the Sun Devils stopped hitting 3s — or doing much of anything else — Stanford was there. Graham’s missed hook with nine seconds left was rebounded by forward Harrison Ingram, who was the only non-Arizona player to pick up one of the conference’s major awards when he was named Freshman of the Year on Tuesday.
Ingram drove it all the way downcourt and tried to move into the paint, then lost control of it about 10 feet away from the basket. But Keefe picked the ball up, then quickly flipped it over the basket, off the glass and in.
He might have to watch the replay to see what exactly happened.
In some ways, for Keefe, it was all a blur.
“Honestly, I don’t know how I ended up with the ball,” Keefe said. “Harrison was driving in and he had a nice spin move but it just kind of got poked out. I knew the game clock was super-low, so I just turned around, shot the ball off the glass like I’ve done a million times before.”
For a team that scored just 39 points in a 14-point loss at Cal just 10 days earlier, then losing to both Arizona and ASU last week, Stanford appeared to have pulled off a pretty remarkable turnaround.
Except Haase indicated he saw the foundation for it happening last week. The Cardinal led Arizona 39-37 at halftime at McKale Center on March 3, then trailed by four points with eight minutes to go, and were tied with ASU two days later with six minutes to go before losing 65-56 at Tempe.
“The Arizona series last week, we had time to get our guys a little bit refreshed, a little bit healthier,” Haase said. “I thought we played solid basketball in Arizona.
“Record-wise, I would agree that it wasn’t trending the right way and Arizona State was trending the right way, but at the end of the day it is a tournament setting. And in tournament settings, you build momentum once you get into the tournament.”
In other words, it’s March. Arizona gets to jump on in Thursday.
