Making the slow and arduous climb back to the NCAA Tournament bubble, the Runnin’ Utes showed Thursday night that they just might be ready to rejoin the conversation for an at-large berth in the Big Dance.
At least, their defense is.
Utah held Oregon State to its second-lowest point total of the season — that’s becoming a theme for the Utes’ opponents — and blasted the Beavers 63-44 at Gill Coliseum to remain in second place in the Pac-12 standings.
“We had pretty good control over that game the whole time. And it kinda got away from us a little bit at the end, so the score doesn’t really tell what it actually looked like, but it was a solid night for us.” — Utah guard Gabe Madsen.
With first-place UCLA losing big at USC on Thursday, Utah (8-3, 15-7) is just a game out of first place in the league race, remarkable considering it was picked to finish 10th in the league and won just four league contests last year.
“I think we are gaining some momentum here, hopefully,” coach Craig Smith told ESPN 700 radio.
Ya think?
It was Utah’s first season sweep over Oregon State since it joined the Pac-12 in 2011, having routed the Beavers 79-60 three weeks ago in Salt Lake City. Utah, which is No. 48 in the NET rankings and four or five spots off the bubble, takes a three-game winning streak into Saturday’s showdown at Oregon, which downed Colorado 75-69 Thursday.
“It is hard to win, period,” Smith said. “It is really hard to win on the road.”
But Utah made this win look easy, jumping out to 10-0 and 27-11 leads and leading wire-to-wire for the third straight game. With nine league games remaining, Utah has already doubled its conference win total in consecutive years for the first time since the 1989-90 season to the 1990-91 season.
“We had pretty good control over that game the whole time,” said Utah guard Gabe Madsen, who led the Utes with 13 points. “And it kinda got away from us a little bit at the end, so the score doesn’t really tell what it actually looked like, but it was a solid night for us.”
For Utah’s defense, it was downright spectacular — until the final five minutes or so when Smith subbed liberally and Oregon State finally found its shooting touch.
Oregon State missed its first 15 3-point attempts and finished 2 of 18 from 3-point range and shot just 34% from the field.
“They struggled shooting,” Madsen told ESPN 700 radio. “That’s kinda what we do (to) teams. So yeah, it was good for us to play well defensively going into the game on Saturday.”
Utah’s defense is elite. Consider that this same OSU team made 13 triples at Cal on Saturday, but couldn’t buy a bucket against the Utes until the outcome was no longer in doubt.
Utah led by as many as 31 points; Oregon State had just 29 points with six minutes remaining in the game.
“Yeah, you could just kinda tell guys were locked in from the start,” Madsen said of the 10-0 early lead. “This is a big week for us and guys aren’t messing around.”
Utah wasn’t that great offensively, but it didn’t need to be with the way the defense was taking everything away from the Beavers. Rollie Worster held OSU leading scorer Jordan Pope to 11 on 5 of 11 shooting and Marco Anthony held Glenn Taylor Jr. to six points on 2 of 8 shooting.
Reigning Pac-12 Player of the Week Branden Carlson was held to 12 points in 23 minutes, but still blocked a couple shots and altered a half-dozen more.
“You could have picked a million different defensive clips,” Smith said.
Worster added 12 points, seven assists and six rebounds in another strong floor game. Utah shot 42% but had 16 second-chance points to OSU’s five and assisted on 16 of its 22 baskets.
“We just made life difficult for them,” Smith said. “… We kept them one and done. I thought we just played super-connected on both ends of the floor.”