Devils come close to pulling off upset

Looking to reverse their fortunes in the midst of an 11-game losing streak, Arizona State’s players broke out their all-gold uniforms for the first time this season.

It wasn’t enough, though, against the best Washington State team in more than two decades. Christian Polk got open looks at a pair of wouldbe go-ahead 3-pointers in the final 30 seconds, but neither fell as the Sun Devils came up just short yet again in a 48-47 loss Saturday evening at Wells Fargo Arena.

The defeat extended the team’s losing streak to a program-record 12 games and leaves ASU (6-16, 0-11 in Pac-10) with just seven chances, including three at home, to pick up its first conference win.

“It’s obviously a painful loss,” ASU coach Herb Sendek said. “It’s no good pretending that it doesn’t hurt, because it does, but still there’s a lot of silver lining.”

The silver lining was the third-largest home crowd of the season and a 16-point rally that put ASU in position to pull off the upset.

Led by Jeff Pendergraph who scored 10 of his game-high 18 points in the second half, the Sun Devils used a long 20-4 run to tie the game at 44-44 with 2:25 to play. The 18 th -ranked Cougars (19-4, 8-3) pushed the lead to four points with 15.5 seconds remaining before Polk hit a 3 from the wing to cut the deficit to 48-47 with 1.9 seconds to go.

An error on WSU’s inbounds attempt gave ASU the ball back with 1.3 seconds.

Coming off a screen, Polk got a clean look at the basket – much cleaner than the look he got before drilling the gamewinner against Iowa – but his 3-point attempt rattled in and out to doom ASU’s upset bid.

“That’s what we wanted,” Pendergraph said of the final shot. “He’s confident enough to hit them. He can hit them, so let’s get him the ball. He knocked that one down (to cut the lead to a point). The last one was a close one. It should’ve fallen.”

“Everyone tends to focus on the last play of the game,” Sendek said. “We could go back through the tape right now and play the woulda-coulda game for a lot of possessions.”

A lot of those possessions were in the first half.

The Sun Devils trailed 40-24 after WSU’s Daven Harmeling hit a 3 and a free throw on the first possession of the second half. From that point forward, ASU forced nine turnovers and limited the visitors to eight points on 3-of-19 shooting.

The run brought the crowd of 9,240 – boosted in size by a grassroots awareness campaign conducted this week on campus – to its feet.

Sendek also found plenty to cheer about on the defensive end as WSU was held to its lowest point total of the season.

“To hold a nationally ranked team to those kinds of numbers, it can’t simply be a function of a lot of chalk dust,” he said. “It still comes down to playing really hard.”

WSU’s success this season may offer a glimmer of hope to Sun Devil fans enduring what is turning into a historically bad season.

The Cougars starting five had played in a combined 312 career games prior to Saturday’s tip off. Most of those appearances came in losses, as the team went 7-11 in Pac-10 play two seasons ago then finished 10th with a 4-14 record last year.

Now, the starters are all grown up (four are upperclassmen) and WSU is locked with Southern California in a twoway tie for second place in the Pac-10.