LOS ANGELES — For a few minutes at the start of the second half in Saturday night’s Pac-12 basketball game against the USC Trojans, the Utah Runnin’ Utes and their best player were seemingly headed toward one of those too-good-to-believe Hollywood endings.
Senior center Branden Carlson rose off his sickbed after a mysterious malady kept him out of the game at UCLA two nights before, and was carrying Utah to what was shaping up to be a nice little upset on the road in front of an announced crowd of 4,671 at the Galen Center.
Trailing by five at halftime, Utah scored the first seven points of the second half to grab the lead as five-point underdogs, and Carlson had a game-high 21 points.
It was shaping up to be the stuff of which legends are made.
“A lot of it is shooting, right? I felt good about our shot selection for the most part. I don’t know that we took a lot of bad shots. ..; We missed a lot of clean looks tonight. When you shoot 25% (in the second half), it is going to be hard to beat anybody.” — Utah basketball coach Craig Smith.
Then guys such as Boogie Ellis, Drew Peterson, Tre White and Reese Dixon-Waters snatched that unbelievable script, crinkled it up, tossed it in the trash can, then produced an ending to their liking.
They powered the Trojans to a 71-56 victory as Carlson ran out of gas and his teammates ran out of the desire to play the kind of defense that had carried them to a 5-0 start in the Pac-12.
“It wasn’t fun,” Carlson said.
The 7-footer was talking about the illness, but he could have easily been talking about the final 17 minutes, when USC (5-2, 13-5) ran away and hid from the Utes (5-3, 12-7) to hand Utah its third-straight loss and deny it a much-needed Los Angeles road swing split (Utah fell 68-49 Thursday night across town at UCLA).
What happened?
Simply, the Utes stopped making shots, and that seemed to sap their energy on the other end.
They looked a bit disinterested on defense — surprising since that’s been their calling card all season — and allowed Ellis and company to go to work and put on a Hollywood-type show for the home crowd, complete with alley-oop dunks, dazzling 3-point shooting displays, and the like.
“A lot of it is shooting, right? I felt good about our shot selection for the most part. I don’t know that we took a lot of bad shots,” said Utah coach Craig Smith. “… We missed a lot of clean looks tonight. When you shoot 25% (in the second half), it is going to be hard to beat anybody.”
After Carlson’s dunk on Utah’s second possession of the second half and Gabe Madsen’s 3-pointer on the Utes’ fourth trip down the floor after the break, neither player scored again.
So Carlson finished with 21 points and nine rebounds on 8 of 12 shooting, while Madsen had just six points on a 2 of 14 effort from the field.
“I think they just got into us, kinda pressured us a little bit, sped us up,” Carlson said. “They were switching every ball screen. I wasn’t getting the pick and pops that I was in the first half. We just gotta be better as a team to be able to adjust to that and to find a way to make that work still.”
As Smith pointed out in his postgame address to the media, on a night Carlson really needed some help offensively, he didn’t get it. Rollie Worster was the only other Ute in double figures, with 12.
Madsen, Lazar Stefanovic and Marco Anthony combined to go 4 of 29 from the field.
Ouch.
USC coach Andy Enfield said he got into his guys a bit at the start of both halves, and it worked.
“Well, we had some things to say in the first media timeout,” Enfield said after the Trojans moved into third place in the Pac-12 standings.
“It is the intensity, the focus, the effort. It is the desire to hold some home court advantage in a big game, and they did. I’m very proud of them. The gave great effort after the first couple of minutes.”
And Utah’s effort waned for one of the few times this season, from this viewpoint, although Smith said he generally was OK with the effort and hustle.
“To only be down five (at halftime), with the way we were playing, I really felt good about that,” he said. “And then the second half, they changed some things, and I thought BC wore down, and then we didn’t have an answer.”
USC shot 52% in the first half and finished at 48% for the game, which is considerably better than Utah has been allowing as the sixth-best team in the country in defensive field goal percentage.
“I just thought we were kinda soft on the ball,” Smith said. “They shot 52% in the first half, which is not our DNA, and that is not good enough for us.
“I thought we got a lot better in the second half, toughened up on the ball, made life a little more difficult on that end of the floor.”
Another big factor was second-chance points, as USC turned 13 offensive rebounds into 19 points — with 14 of those coming in the second half.
“In the second half, we just struggled to keep them off the glass,” Carlson said. “They were shooting those tough jumpers and there were long rebounds, and we just have to know that and be able to be in position to get those.”
After shooting a reasonable 45% in the first half, the Utes shot 25% in the second half (8 of 32) and seemed more concerned about drawing fouls than making shots.
“It is going to be hard to beat a good team when you do that,” Smith said.
If there was a positive sign for the Utes, it is that they turned the ball over only 10 times while playing what Smith termed a “more structured” offensive style.
Freshman Wil Exacte had seven points in 18 minutes and continued to impress, aside from three turnovers.
“He had a couple turnovers that he needs to keep tightening up, but he gave us great energy and gave an edge to us,” Smith said of the freshman.
“(Fellow freshman) Keba Keita gave us good minutes, specifically in that second half. He had two or three offensive rebounds that were big plays for us to just kinda keep us anchored to what we were trying to do.”
Carlson, meanwhile, acknowledged that he was “a little tired” in the second half when the Trojans gradually pulled away. Only Worster (33 minutes) played more than Carlson (32 minutes).
“I could feel it a little bit,” Carlson said, “but overall I am feeling pretty good for being sick a couple days ago. … I woke up the next day feeling pretty good, but still a bit sluggish. But today I woke up feeling super good.”
And for 22 minutes of action he was having a super game — before the Trojans flipped the script.