SEATTLE — The T-shirts bore three digits, each representing a preseason goal that seemed attainable in the fourth year of the Tia Jackson era.
The University of Washington women’s basketball team used those numbers — 4, 20 and 64 — to drive them to greater heights. Top four of the Pac-10 Conference standings, 20 wins, and the NCAA tournament’s field of 64.
And one of them was still within the Huskies’ reach — until Thursday night.
A UW team that had already played its way out of 20-win possibility and the NCAA tournament conversation may have sustained its most important loss of the season Thursday night when fourth-place Arizona State dealt the Huskies a 71-63 defeat at Hec Edmundson Pavilion.
Rather than pushing themselves within a half-game of fourth place, UW (10-13 overall, 5-9 in the Pac-10) appears well on its way to a fourth consecutive finish in the bottom half of the conference standings.
“I don’t think it’s anything to sugar-coat,” UW head coach Jackson said after the loss. “We had a great opportunity to showcase what we did in the Bay Area (last week, with a split against Cal and Stanford), and we simply didn’t.”
The crushing blow came from a familiar combination of punches. One of the best defensive teams in the Pac-10, the Huskies struggled to get clean looks at the basket against ASU’s suffocating defense. UW shot 22 of 60 from the field, and its first open shot didn’t come until 31⁄2 minutes into the second half — when Sarah Morton hit an 18-foot jumper while her defender writhed on the floor following a hard screen from UW’s Mollie Williams.
Leading scorer Kristi Kingma missed 12 of her first 15 shots and never really got into a rhythm. She didn’t hit back-to-back shots the entire night, finishing 5-for-20 from the field despite a team-high 18 points.
Yet through it all, the Huskies rallied from a 16-point deficit early in the second half to get within three points, at 48-45, with 7:20 remaining. From there, the Sun Devils rode the timely scoring of Becca Tobin and some clutch free-throw shooting to close out the win.
Two key sequences helped ASU (15-8, 7-6) pull away down the stretch.
The first came after UW’s Charmaine Barlow cut the gap to three points on a traditional three-point play with 7:20 remaining. The Sun Devils couldn’t get a good shot off on their next possession, but after Dymond Simon’s bailout 3 careened off the rim as the shot clock expired, teammate Deja Mann got the putback and a foul to extend the lead to 50-45.
A minute-and-a-half later, with UW trailing by seven points, Simon converted a traditional three-point play after teammate Alex Earl stole the ball in the backcourt and assisted on Simon’s scoop layup. After Simon hit the free throw, the ASU lead had swelled to 55-45 with 5:10 remaining, and the Huskies never got closer than six points the rest of the way.
Tobin, with 21 points off 9-of-11 shooting, had a knack for hitting a big shot every time the Huskies tried to make a run.
“Tonight was her night,” UW’s Jackson said of Tobin. “That kid played out of her mind. They knew it, and they kept going to her.”
UW was coming off one of its most encouraging weekends of the season, having beaten Cal and played a close game against fourth-ranked Stanford in the Bay Area. But as has been the case too often during the Jackson era, the air went out of the balloon just as quickly as it had filled up.
Afterward, Jackson showed signs of frustration as she led the team into a post-game huddle at mid-court.
“I am pretty frustrated,” she told reporters about 30 minutes later, after a long session in the UW locker room. “We have to figure out how to be more consistent when we’re riding high, and we were riding high this week.”
Wearing pink uniforms to commemorate college basketball’s breast cancer awareness month, the Sun Devils set the tone from the outset with suffocating defense. They led 33-21 at halftime after holding UW to 7 of 25 field-goal shooting in the opening 20 minutes.
UW’s Morton made a four-point play on a 3-pointer and foul six minutes into the second half to help spark a brief run, but the Huskies could never quite get over the hump.
UW remains stuck in eighth place, behind teams like Washington State and Cal — against whom the Huskies have a combined 3-0 record this season.
“It’s a tough pill to swallow,” Morton said, “just knowing this wasn’t Husky basketball and it wasn’t our best effort. We’ll just try to move on and get ready for Arizona (on Saturday).”
Even a win in that game might not be enough to save the Huskies’ last remaining goal.
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