Pac-12 Basketball: Each team’s worst performance of the last decade
By Joey Loose
Arizona State
January 21, 2012 (at Utah 64, Arizona State 43) (GS: 0)
One of the negatives of this article presenting teams in alphabetical order is that I’ve yet to have the chance to dive into Utah’s struggles. We’ll get into this much more later, but for now, you need to understand that in 2012 Utah was extremely bad. It’s fair to say that Arizona State wasn’t exactly a world-beater and its performances like this that squarely prove that. This was a season where Arizona State lost at a home to a 9-19 Pepperdine squad and yet this game was even worse than that!
The first twelve points belonged to Utah, and that alone was already a ridiculous disaster. By halftime, Arizona State was in a 38-21 hole that they could not peel themselves out of and their worst loss in a decade was already underway. Earning a 0 Game Score, the Sun Devils missed free throws (6-13), missed 3-pointers (3-15), and were outplayed by a Utah squad that only played 7 players in a 21-point victory. We’ll get into Utah in time, but for now you just need to know that this was their best game of the season by a long-shot, and Arizona State’s bad defense certainly helped that along.
Fortunately, Bobby Hurley has Arizona State moving in the right direction. There have been far fewer bad losses and more great wins in recent times and that trend should continue as long as the ex-Duke product stays at the helm.