PULLMAN — Big leads don’t mean much at Washington State.
Klay Thompson scored 27 points and the Cougars barely held on to beat Stanford 77-73 on Saturday, after leading the Cardinal by 20 points at halftime and 17 with eight minutes left.
Reggie Moore was 7 of 8 from the free-throw line in the final 50 seconds to keep Stanford from taking the lead.
On Thursday, Washington State (13-5, 3-3 Pac-10) fell 20 points behind California in the opening 12 minutes, then stormed back before losing by five points.
“We’ve got to play closer to 40 minutes of solid basketball,” WSU coach Ken Bone said. “Maybe it’s time to shake up the lineup and go with different guys.
Bone added, “We’ll take a look at that this week.”
Stanford jumped to a quick 10-2 lead, but was outscored 44-16 the rest of the first half as the Cougars took a 46-26 lead into intermission. Thompson, the Pac-10’s leading scorer at 22.7 points per game, broke out of a shooting slump by scoring 17 in the first half.
But Stanford (8-9, 2-3) clamped down on defense and outscored the Cougars 47-31 in the second half.
“At halftime, coach really got to us,” Stanford’s Jeremy Green said of coach Johnny Dawkins. “His speech, he really got into it.”
Green scored 24 points for Stanford, 12 in the final five minutes.
A 13-0 run, highlighted by consecutive 3-pointers by Green, brought the Cardinal to within four points with 4:27 remaining. Drew Shiller hit a 3-pointer for Stanford to make the score 70-66 in WSU’s favor with 54 seconds left.
Three times in the last 33 seconds, Stanford cut the WSU lead to two points. Each time, Moore sank a pair of free throws to give the Cougars more cushion.
Green’s final 3-point attempt missed, and the Cardinal could not score in the scramble under the basket as time expired.
Moore finished with nine points.
“With him knocking down free throws, we could keep the lead, and all we got to do is get stops,” WSU’s Marcus Capers said. “We were the team that was winning.”
Dawkins praised his team’s second-half effort.
“They fought. They tried to make a great comeback,” Dawkins said. “We didn’t have enough time, and they (WSU) executed at the end.”
Stanford fell to 0-6 on the road.
“On the road, you have to play defense, and you’ve got to take care of the ball,” Stanford’s Landry Fields said. “Each game that we’ve lost (on the road), we showed a lack of defense and lack of taking care of the ball.”
Thompson made 11 of 20 shots and had three of WSU’s 10 blocks. Capers and Nik Koprivica added 10 points each, while DeAngelo Casto had nine points, eight rebounds and three blocks for the Cougars.
Stanford nearly won despite shooting just 35 percent in the game, compared to 51 percent for Washington State. Fields scored 18 points for Stanford, 13 in the second half. He added 10 rebounds. Jack Trotter had 12 points and Shiller 10 for the Cardinal.
Fields, second in the Pac-10 at 21.8 points per game, continued to struggle against the Cougars. In his previous seven outings against WSU, he averaged less than four points per game.
The Cougars’ next three Pac-10 games are all on the road: at the Los Angeles schools and Washington.
“We are going to need to play better than we did (Saturday),” Bone said.
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