By Kirby Arnold
Herald Writer
SEATTLE – The Washington Huskies were doomed, it turned out, around the time Brandon Granville laced up his basketball shoes Thursday night.
Granville, the University of Southern California point guard known best for his playmaking and assists, became a scoring machine with a career-high 27 points in the Trojans’ 87-65 Pacific-10 Conference victory at Hec Edmundson Pavilion.
Granville scored 20 of his points in the first half, 12 on 3-pointers.
“He got it in different ways,” UW coach Bob Bender said. “He was doing it in transition, he was doing it off of turnovers, we lost track of him in our zone (defense) and he hit some threes on us.”
What Granville and the experienced Trojans performed wasn’t so much a dismantling of the youthful Huskies as it was a dissection.
Besides Granville, a 5-foot-9 senior point guard who is considered one of the Pac-10’s top players, USC also threw the vaunted inside presence of 6-7 senior forward Sam Clancy, who scored 25 points, and 6-7 senior forward David Bluthenthal, who scored 14 and grabbed a game-high nine rebounds.
“It was the three guys of experience and ability,” Bender said. “Those are three of the premier guys in our league.”
Against a UW roster that is filled with freshmen and sophomores, Bender feared such an outcome. The Huskies’ starting front-line players were held to a combined 18 points, and the Trojans (9-2 overall, 1-0 in the league) milked 25 turnovers from Washington with a variety of full-court presses.
“We were outmatched physically and beat in a lot of ways,” Bender said. “This is a learning process and the team needs to use this as a tool for understanding another level, and it is my job to help them.”
Freshman reserve guard Erroll Knight led the Huskies with 13 points and junior guard Josh Barnard added 10.
Knight, who played at Chief Sealth High School, agreed that USC’s experience was a huge factor. He also blamed the Huskies’ lack of effort.
“They were going for loose balls, offensive rebounds,” Knight said. “They just wanted it more, I guess. Experience has a lot to do with it. But you can be a senior or a freshman and as long as you have effort and heart, it can balance out. Today, we didn’t show that.”
Bender said the effort in practice lately hasn’t been stellar, either.
“There hasn’t been a great concentration level, there wasn’t a great sustained effort until we challenged them,” he said. “The difficulty for this team now is that we’ve dropped three games in a row and you don’t get a reprieve to feel sorry for yourself.”
The Huskies (6-5 overall, 0-2 in the Pac-10) have lost four of their last five and travel to St. Louis for a non-conference game Saturday against the Billikens.
The only flurry by the Huskies on Thursday happened in the final moments when freshman David Hudson, who entered the game with three minutes left, scored nine points on three 3-pointers.
By then, the outcome had long been decided.
After Barnard scored the first basket of the game for a 2-0 UW lead, the Trojans steadily pulled away.
Granville hit a 10-foot pullup jump shot for a 16-point lead (36-20) with 4:56 left in the first half before the Huskies made their only run of the game.
Knight hit a 3-pointer and followed with a drive through USC’s zone defense for a dunk, pulling the Huskies within 11 (36-25).
“It looked like we had a little momentum, a little confidence growing,” Bender said.
And then Granville flashed his golden touch.
He made a 3-pointer from the top of the key, another from the right wing and, after a UW time out, converted a fast-break layup that finished an eight-point run. In a 52-second span, Granville single-handedly put the Huskies into a 19-point hole from which they never recovered.
“He completely turned it around,” Bender said. “It was quick. A three, a three, a drive to the basket. Eight points come real quick.”
Soon to follow was a defeat for the Huskies that became a bitter example of what experience will do to youth in the Pac-10.
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