The USC men’s basketball season finally encountered a moment of real adversity on Sunday night in the Galen Center. Eric Musselman lost his first game as the Trojans’ bench boss. USC fell 71-66 to California in a weird game which took a drastic turn in the last six and a half minutes.
The score of the Cal game was 43-42 USC at halftime. The Trojans played a racehorse game against UT Arlington last week in which defense was optional. USC led 51-42 at halftime of that game and then continued to play ineffective defense in the second half. USC’s offense was able to overcome its lack of defense in a 98-95 win. The Cal game looked like another shootout after one half, and USC’s defense was plainly ineffective for most of the night. USC’s guards were beaten on the dribble. They couldn’t keep Cal’s guards out of the paint, which created all sorts of opportunities for the Golden Bears.
However, midway through the second half, the game began to take on different dimensions. USC began to dig in on defense. The faucet of points for Cal got shut off. USC gained a 64-63 lead with just under seven minutes left in regulation and was showing signs of steering this game in a different direction.
If you were watching the game, you would have assumed that if USC could get stops and hold Cal to a modest point total in the second half, the Trojans would have won. After all, they shot over 55 percent from the field in the first half. They were on pace to score 86 points at halftime. If USC held Cal to 29 second-half points, 71 for the full game, that pointed to a USC win.
Except it didn’t.
The Trojans’ offense, which flowed so well in the first 30 minutes, came to a grinding halt in the last 6:30. USC scored exactly two points in that span of time. Leading scorer Desmond Claude missed two huge free throws with a little over two minutes left. Terrance Williams had a wide-open 3-pointer in the last minute to give USC the lead, but it wasn’t even close. The Trojans went stone cold, dying at the 3-point line and not getting enough free throw opportunities to collect cheap points. A night which started with bad defense ended with bad offense, and USC fell short against its former Pac-12 neighbor.
Eric Musselman didn’t have time to recruit his first USC roster. Remember, this roster was almost completely created from the transfer portal. We are seeing the limitations of that roster. Musselman has to find a way to get everyone to contribute more at both ends of the floor.
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