If the Huskies find themselves on the NCAA tournament bubble come March and don’t get in, this is a game that they’ll likely look back at with a bit of regret.
There were plenty of chances for the Huskies to put the game away, but Cal somehow won despite leading only 1-0 and then 86-85. Isaiah Thomas’ foul at the end of second overtime certainly sticks out as one of the biggest mistakes, but he’s hardly alone in the blame for this one (plus, when you’re getting 22 points from a freshman, you’ve got to take a little bad with the good).
After the game, Thomas was asked about the play and only said: “I missed a box out, plain and simple.”
Thomas said after the game that he and his teammates are ready to put this loss behind them and move forward:
“What’s done is done. This game is over with. We’ve got the Oregon schools next and we’ve got to get after it in practice and just try to forget about it as best we can and try to get two wins next week.”
Here’s a bit of what Lorenzo Romar had to say:
“Give Cal a lot of credit for being mentally tough on the road to come out and squeak out a triple-overtime victory. You’ve got to give them a lot of credit. There’s a reason they’ve done so well and they’re undefeated. Patrick Christopher is a heck of a basketball player, made big shots. Their trio did a really nice job, especially in the overtime periods, carried them.
“We obviously had our chances. We’ve got no one to blame but ourselves. We did a lot of things to gain a victory in this game, but we also did too many things to allow it to slip away.”
Do you have to say anything to the team to make sure they put this game behind them?
“We addressed that afterwards. We’ve got 15 games left in this Pac-10 season, you can allow something like this to send you into a tailspin the wrong way, and we definitely don’t want that to happen and we’ve worked too hard to allow that to happen. Like I said, it’s too early in the conference season to allow that to happen. Are we all disappointed? Am I disappointed, frustrated tonight? Yes. At about 2:30 in the morning when I throw a banana at the TV when I’m looking at the film, I’ll be frustrated again, but we’ve got to understand that we’ve got to go on the road for two game and we’ve got to bounce back.”
“What was the most frustrating part of the loss?
“The mental errors. I just thought at times we used poor judgment in certain situations… Situation that if any of us that was made the mistake was watching another game, they’d say, ‘Don’t do that. Why did they do that?’ Things that we knew better, but sometimes in the heat of the battle those mistakes are made.”
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