USC's Marcus Johnson slam dunks against UCLA in Sunday's game at Galen Center. USC won, 68-64. (Photo by Mario Villegas)
Story Created:
Feb 15, 2010 at 11:24 AM PST
Story Updated:
Feb 15, 2010 at 3:40 PM PST
USC coach Kevin O’Neill isn’t much into style points these days.
“We’re just trying to take it one game at a time, win as many games as we can and see how the other teams do,” he said following Sunday’s less-than artistic 68-64 victory over UCLA before a season-high crowd of 8,836 at Galen Center.
“Four of our last six games are on the road. We’ve got a big game at Washington and a big game at Washington State coming up. We need to win them both.”
The Trojans, ineligible for postseason play, are 15-9 overall and 7-5 in the Pac-10, good for third place. They head north this week to face Washington Thursday and Washington State Saturday.
They trail California (17-8, 9-4) and Arizona State (18-8, 8-5) in the standings. UCLA (11-13, 6-6), which was swept by USC, dropped to sixth place.
It could properly be termed an ugly win considering the Trojans committed 20 turnovers and were outrebounded 46-25. They also twice fouled Bruins attempting 3-pointers in the final minute, keeping the game in doubt longer than it should have been.
“If you made a list of things not to do going down the stretch, we did them,” O’Neill said. “We missed free throws, we fouled their 3-point shooters and gave up a tip-in when they were at the foul line.”
On the positive side for the Trojans, Dwight Lewis scored 23 points and went 4 for 4 from the free throw line in the final minute.
UCLA, which got 21 points from Michael Roll (he was 4 for 10 on 3-pointers), was only down, 56-52 and was looking to cut into that deficit when Marcus Johnson stole the ball from Jerime Anderson in the backcourt and went in for a slam dunk at the 2:17 mark. USC then went 6 of 7 from the line the rest of the way.
The Trojans also received a big contribution from backup point guard Donte Smith, who scored 12 points and hit a couple of 3-pointers in 19 minutes.
O’Neill conceded one thing afterwards.
“We executed well enough to win,” he said. “I’ll take any kind of win any time.”
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