False bravado: Huskies thrash Cougars with huge second half

Reggie Moore threw down a one-handed dunk, flexed, then shot a menacing stare at the Washington bench, his WSU team leading by three with 4:15 left in the first half and looking like the aggressor in a crucial, must-win conference game for the Washington men's basketball team. Big mistake, as it turned out. "Young freshman," said UW senior Quincy Pondexter of Moore's antics. "Unless you're LeBron James, I wouldn't advise that to add any more motivation to another team, especially at their home." "We noticed," UW head coach Lorenzo Romar said. Moore's false bravado was about as tough as Washington State got against the Huskies on Saturday. Trailing by four at halftime, UW went on a 19-2 run to begin the second half, while outscoring the Cougars 56-24 the rest of the way, dismantling their cross-state rival in a 92-64 blowout in front of a sellout crowd of 10,000 at Hec Edmundson Pavilion. But early on, it didn't look like it would end that way. WSU raced out to a 14-3 lead, hitting open shots and displaying a swagger that would usually be more familiar coming from the Huskies sideline. "They came in cocky," UW junior guard Venoy Overton said. "They came in our house flagging their jerseys and playing way more aggressive than us in the first half." Pondexter took it on himself to give his team a jump start. "We're not losing," Pondexter said, when asked what went through his head when WSU took an 11-point lead in the first half. "We're not losing this game. I thought I needed to step up a little bit more and score a little bit more." Everyone else must have had the same idea. The Huskies woke up in the second half, clamping down defensively as the Cougars missed their first 13 shots and didn't score a field goal until DeAngelo Casto's layup with 13:05 cut UW's lead to 55-44. By that point, it was too late. Washington was running, rebounding and scoring with ease, Pondexter leading the attack with 29 points and 12 rebounds. The Huskies led by double digits for the game's final 14 minutes, and the Cougars went the entire second half without scoring consecutive baskets. Klay Thompson, the Cougars' leading scorer at 22.7 points per game, was limited to just seven by UW forward Justin Holiday. And Nikola Koprivica, who hit three 3-pointers in the first half, finished with the 13 points he had at halftime. It was just the third time this year Thompson that scored less than 10 points. "We just wanted to chase him off of screens, not let him get nothing easy," Overton said. "Let him feel us that we were there. Our defense made him miss shots." The UW lead continued to swell the entire second half, Washington never relenting as it forced the Cougars to shoot 8-for-35 from the field in the period. Once the second half started, WSU simply never had a chance. "I just think we brought more energy, and we rebounded more," said Isaiah Thomas, who made three 3-pointers in the second half and finished with 19 points. "Once we rebounded, we got out in transition. That was the difference between the first half and the second half, offensively." Washington's (14-7, 4-5 Pac-10) second-half explosion may have been a result of the game's heated tempo, as things turned chippy when Pondexter and Xavier Thames were whistled for a double technical in the first half for getting in each other's faces. Pondexter was also knocked to the floor, without a whistle, on a UW possession late in the first half, one of several heated exchanges that caused the crowd to boo the officials as they ran into the locker room at halftime. That was the last proverbial punch the Cougars would throw. "Those guys came to play, and they were laying their stake right there," Romar said. "That's all they were doing. I didn't take that as, 'Oh, these guys are a bunch of brash, arrogant guys.' I didn't see that at all. These guys were out there competing. They were going to let us know, 'Hey, we're coming after you. You've got to fight back.'" And the Huskies did, that fact perhaps no more evident than it was as a much more subdued Moore spoke to a crowd of reporters outside WSU's locker room. "They just started hitting their shots," Moore said. "We couldn't hit ours. They came right at us." And ran right over them - sans flexing. Reach Sports Editor Christian Caple at sports@dailyuw.com.

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