A pair of losses on Saturday to the top teams in the conference.
Both Washington State’s men’s and women’s basketball teams lost to some of the top teams in the WCC on Saturday.
The women’s balanced effort of all five starters reaching double-digit points wasn’t enough to outweigh Maisie Burnham’s 31 points for the Portland Pilots, resulting in an 84-79 Pilot win. The men’s team hung around with Saint Mary’s over the first 20 minutes, but the Gaels separated early in the second half and didn’t look back, beating WSU 77-56. SMC’s Paulius Murauskas scored 30 points—20 in the first half—and hauled in 10 rebounds.
Kamie Ethridge’s squad got out to a good start in Portland, hitting four of their first six shots to take an early four-point lead. The Pilots answered quick with a 10-2 run to flip the lead and build it all the way out to 12 with a 7-0 run to open the second quarter. For the rest of the game, the Cougars got the runs they needed to put themselves back in the game, but for every run they had, the Pilots had an answer. After the Pilots took a two-possession lead in the first quarter, WSU would only come back to be within one possession for 16 seconds in the third quarter. It’s not like WSU played entirely poorly. They shot 48.5% from the field and had the same numbers of turnovers as Portland, but the Pilots timely runs to answer WSU’s comeback efforts constantly kept WSU at arms length.
For David Riley’s team, it was more of the same recipe that’s had this team lose six of their last seven. Flashes of the team we saw early in the year that can compete with anybody before self-inflicted mistakes catch up to them. The Cougars entered the half only trailing by four points. While they did have seven turnovers, they were shooting the ball well, hitting 51.9% of their shots from the field and hitting 4/7 of their three-point attempts. If they could find a way to slow down Murauskas and limit the offensive rebounds the Gaels were gathering, they could very well find a way to pull the upset.
Instead, the Gaels came out with a haymaker, hitting seven of their first nine shots while WSU hit only one of their first eight. The polar opposite shooting allowed SMC to push their four-point halftime lead out to 18 within the first five minutes of the second half. WSU more or less folded after that, never breaking back within single digits, losing for the eigth time in their last 11 games.
The men’s team will return to action against the Gonzaga Bulldogs on Wednesday night in Pullman and the women’s team hosting the San Francisco Dons on Thursday.