USC basketball season ends with OT loss in Big Ten tournament

CHICAGO- The eventual end of USC’s men’s basketball season occurred the same way it had collapsed over the past month, with another second-half collapse marked by the added pain of overtime.

Tuesday’s 83-79 overtime loss to Washington in the Big Ten tournament, the Trojans’ eighth straight loss, ended what USC coach Eric Musselman called the most difficult period of his coaching career. That included not only USC’s longest losing streak in a decade, but also two 19-point losses to UCLA and the dismissal of leading scorer Chad Baker-Mazara from the team in just the last 10 days.

The Trojans led the Huskies by 13 in the second half and had chances to win at the end of regulation and overtime, only to miss all three potential game-winning or tying shots and go 2-for-5 from the free throw line in overtime. For a team that once made an NCAA Tournament before stumbling, this failure was a lingering flaw.

USC guard Alijah Arenas talks with coach Eric Musselman during the Trojans’ loss to the Huskies in the Big Ten tournament Wednesday in Chicago.

(Michael Reaves/Getty Images)

“That’s the story of our last eight games,” Musselman said. “I think we’ve led at halftime four of our last eight games, and as a group we haven’t figured out how to close out games, the last 20 minutes with a lead. It’s been a disappointing last eight games of the season. I thought up until that point we played good basketball.”

With the Trojans likely to decline any playoff invitations, Musselman said, he was heading to the team hotel Tuesday night to get back to work on filling out next season’s recruiting class, starting with more freshmen before the transfer portal officially opens next month.

That group already features two top-30 recruits in the Ratliff twins, Adonis and Darius, but if USC has learned anything from the way this season ended, too similar to last season, it’s that whatever depth and talent Musselman has assembled in his two years at USC, it hasn’t been enough, whether from freshmen or transfers.

“We want a mix of both,” Musselman said. “We are only at the beginning of our term and we need to find a way to do better than what we have done over the last two years.”

Tuesday, the Trojans had no shortage of opportunities to hold on until the end.

They had a double-digit lead with 13 minutes remaining. They had the ball at the end of regulation time with the score tied. They were lucky to win it in overtime and had a last-ditch shot to tie the game.

They missed all three pivotal shots — the first two by Kam Woods, the last three-pointer by Jordan Marsh — only to see a game they once led comfortably slip away again and again.

“On the last one, I feel like I missed Ezra [Ausar] on this cut,” said Woods, a graduate transfer who joined the team midseason. “Coach trusted me with the ball in my hands, and I feel like I let him down.”

Woods finished with 24 points while Jacob Cofie scored 14, Marsh 13 and Ausar and Ryan Cornish 10 each for 13th-seeded USC (18-14), as the 12th-seeded Huskies (16-16) beat the Trojans for the third time this season.

Freshman Alijah Arenas, who led the Trojans in scoring in the two games without Baker-Mazara, was held to six points on 3-of-10 shooting and missed the final six minutes of regulation and all but eight overtimes. Musselman said it was his decision, as was the near absence of senior Terrance Williams, who played just one minute.

That left USC with what was essentially a six-player rotation to conclude a season that began without the injured Arenas and ended without Rodney Rice and Amarion Dickerson, both injured, as well as the departed Baker-Mazara — all of which factored into where Musselman stands in all postseason plans.

“I haven’t had any in-depth discussions with the administration about it yet, but my guess is we’re not going to play, just based on the body count and the way we’ve played the last eight games,” Musselman said.

It wasn’t that long ago that USC was thinking about the NCAA Tournament. Winner of the Maui Invitational, USC was 18-6 and over .500 in the Big Ten standings after a Feb. 8 win at Penn State, firmly in a viable position on the NCAA Tournament bubble.

But as injuries mounted and momentum waned, the second-half struggles, much like those of the Trojans on Tuesday, became an increasingly fatal flaw as they slumped to their longest losing streak in a decade. The loss to Washington compounded the misery of a second straight frustrating season in a familiar way.

“As a team, we faced a lot of adversity,” Cofie said. “I felt like we did a good job of staying true to that and trying to play for each other. We had to deal with a lot of injuries. I felt like that played a huge role. We still fought. We did our best.”