Michael Tao/Senior Staff

The first sign was a cold dose of reality in Wisconsin.

After beating up on middling competition to start the season 6-0, the Cal men’s basketball team lost by 25 to the Badgers on Dec. 2. “I would’ve liked to seen us compete,” said coach Mike Montgomery after the game.

In hindsight, falling at home to Harvard was not so bad, but there is no sugarcoating the way the Bears gave up 20 offensive rebounds in a 62-47 home loss to Washington, a performance that caused Montgomery to question his squad’s mental toughness.

Perhaps the final blow was 10 days later at Stanford, where the Cardinal shot 36 percent from the field yet still beat Cal easily.

At 2-3 in the Pac-12 and 10-7 overall, the Bears had more problems than solutions, but one thing was clear: This team was not contending for a Pac-12 title and was not making the NCAA Tournament.

“People maybe didn’t see us even making the NIT,” said forward David Kravish.

To say Cal turned things around would be a gross understatement. The Bears won nine of their final 11 regular-season games to finish in a second-place tie and reach the Big Dance for the second-straight year.

Unlike in 2012, Cal’s NCAA Tournament opener was no play-in game — and it was no embarrassing loss. The Bears, a No. 12 seed with the good fortune of playing in San Jose, faced off against a UNLV squad that had beaten them by one point earlier in the season. At HP Pavilion on March 21, Cal made it clear who the better team was, upsetting the Runnin’ Rebels, 64-61, to advance to the round of 32.

Two days later, the Bears were bested by Syracuse and its athletic, long-armed 2-3 zone. There is no shame in falling 66-60 to the Orange, who have since beaten top seed Indiana and No. 3 seed Marquette by a combined 27 points en route to a Final Four berth.

For a team that could never quite crack the top-25 rankings, finishing in the round of 32 — equaling the Bears’ best tournament finish in the last decade and a half — was a fitting end to Cal’s season.

On Feb. 10, one week after upsetting No. 10 Oregon in Berkeley, the Bears shocked No. 7 Arizona in Tucson. It was the first of seven straight wins that vaulted Cal into second place and NCAA Tournament conversation.

The highlight of that run might have been the Bears’ Valentine’s Day massacre of UCLA. Inside a packed Haas Pavilion, Cal played what was unequivocally its best half of the season, taking a 47-22 lead into halftime.

“This is the team we should have been all season,” Kravish said after the game. “This is the team we should be.”

It was not necessarily the team they would be. In many of the wins that followed, the Bears struggled shooting the ball and employed an aggressive, physical defense to grind out victories.

That defense is the foundation for what should be a bright future.

Allen Crabbe, the Pac-12 Player of the Year and leading scorer, has given no indication as to whether he will enter the NBA Draft. Even if the junior swingman leaves, the Bears should have the pieces to contend for a conference title and reach the NCAA Tournament for the fifth time in six years with Montgomery’s at the program’s helm.

6-foot-6 guard Ricky Kreklow, who was injured for most of the season, and five-star recruit Jabari Bird should make up for Crabbe’s production. Aside from Crabbe, Cal will return all but three senior reserves, and everyone, particularly Tyrone Wallace and Richard Solomon, will surely continue to improve under Montgomery’s tutelage.

Wallace could very well be a jump shot away from becoming a star, while Solomon’s 33 points and 21 rebounds in two NCAA Tournament games is evidence the 6-foot-10 forward could be close to realizing his potential.

And the sky-high expectations the Bears will face if Crabbe does stay — well, there are worse problems to have.

Jonathan Kuperberg covers men’s basketball. Contact him at jkuperberg@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanKupe.

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Michael Tao/Senior Staff

SAN JOSE — As Allen Crabbe and Justin Cobbs go, so too goes the Cal men’s basketball team.

The 12-seeded Bears were going to need excellent performances from their All-Pac-12 duo to upend No. 4 seed Syracuse in their NCAA Tournament round of 32 game on Saturday. Yet, on the biggest stage of their basketball careers, Crabbe and Cobbs simply faded away, combining for 13 points and nine turnovers in Cal’s 66-60 loss to the Orange.

“We didn’t have a lot of people that were playing above their ability,” said Bears coach Mike Montgomery. “We didn’t have a whole bunch of people that rose to the occasion that this was a big game and (they were) going to play better than (they had).”

At HP Pavilion, the promise of a Sweet Sixteen berth for Cal (21-12) was soured by the Orange (28-9). In a game that gave new meaning to the word “ugly,” the Bears turned the ball over 17 times and put Syracuse on the foul line 41 times. The Orange only made a ghastly 63 percent of their free throws, but Cal, looking out of sorts all game against Syracuse’s renowned 2-3 zone, could never sustain a scoring run to prevail.

“We don’t really play teams who are in the zone for 40 minutes,” said Crabbe, who shot 3-of-9 from the field. “We didn’t attack the zone like we should have.

“They keyed on me. The shots that I thought I would probably get weren’t there.”

The Bears, coming off an inspired performance in their second-round win over UNLV Thursday, lazily passed the ball around the perimeter for much of Saturday’s contest, rarely attacking the rim until late in the game. Crabbe did not attempt his first shot until eight and a half minutes had passed. That 3-pointer was his only basket of the half, while Cobbs was scoreless in the first 20 minutes. As such, Cal was lucky to only be down 32-24 at halftime.

Syracuse jumped out to an 11-2 lead to start the game, taking advantage of seven straight turnovers by the Bears. With virtually no production from Crabbe and Cobbs, Cal was led by inconsistent forward Richard Solomon, erratic guard Tyrone Wallace and offensively-limited forward Robert Thurman. Cal had some success finding Thurman down low from high-post feeds, while Wallace slipped through Syracuse’s zone for three first-half buckets. Solomon had nine at the half, including consecutive three-point plays where he just outmuscled the Orange’s big men. Solomon finished with 22 points and 14 rebounds in his best performance at Cal.

“I thought we started the game very, very tentative,” Montgomery said. “I don’t really know what we expected of the zone or what we expected of Syracuse, but we didn’t have the same confidence level that we had against UNLV.”

The Orange opened up the second half on a mission to be the aggressor and drive to the basket. If they made their free throws, they would have ran Cal out of the building. The Bears went 8:38 without scoring a field goal, but Syracuse could not build a lead larger than 14 when it was scoring one point at a time.

A late scoring spree by Cal made the score — and its offensive statistics — look respectable. Crabbe and Walace drained back-to-back threes to narrow the score to 58-51 with 1:52 remaining. A layup by Cobbs 30 seconds later had the Bears only six points down. But turnovers continued to haunt Cal, as the Bears handed the ball over three times in the final two minutes to put an end to their attempt at a furious comeback.

“If we had come out with that in the beginning, it might have been a different game,” said forward David Kravish. “I think we helped give it away.”

Syracuse moves on to regional semifinals on Thursday in Washington D.C. The Bears, meanwhile, saw an improved finish from last season when they lost in the NCAA Tournament play-in game. Crabbe, the Pac-12 Player of the Year, not surprisingly gave no indication as to whether he had played his last game in a Cal uniform. “It would be selfish of me to think about my future,” he said.

Cobbs, meanwhile, talked about taking the positives from this game and this season into the next one.

“The way we stuck together, the way we played as a team, the way we fought in this game … I’m proud of everyone,” he said.

Jonathan Kuperberg covers men’s basketball. Contact him at jkuperberg@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanKupe.

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SAN JOSE — Simply look at the seeding, and No. 12 seeded Cal’s win over No. 5 seeded UNLV looks like your classic first-round NCAA Tournament upset. But was it really that unexpected? Was it that inexplicable that the Bears would pull out the upset?

Cal rode a seven-game winning streak until its final regular-season game against Stanford but dropped its final two games of the season. Still, the Bears carried a significant amount of momentum into the postseason, stepping up their defensive intensity and looking nothing like the team that began the year with losses to Harvard and, coincidentally, UNLV.

Key in the Bears’ transformation from pretender to contender was the improved efficiency of guard Justin Cobbs. Early in the season, Cobbs relied too often on settling for contested jumpers and routinely extended his shot selection from outside 3-point range. The new and improved late-season Cobbs cut out his bad 3-point shooting habits and stepped up in his role as a distributor. Cobbs cut out his inefficient shooting performances and emerged as an above-average secondary option on the offensive end.

The Bears’ capabilities on the defensive end also improved massively down the stretch. After allowing 79-plus points to Wisconsin, UCLA and Colorado early in the season, Cal successfully mitigated opponent scoring to under 70 points per performance for the remainder of the season. By the end of their campaign, their defense ranked among the best in the country, according to kenpom.com.

Their defensive efficiency ranked overall 45th in the country. Cal stifled all short-range attempts; its 2-point field goal percentage against opponents stood at ninth in the entire country. Although the Bears were unable to force many turnovers (321st in the country), their defense did a fantastic job at contesting shots and holding opponents’ scoring totals low.

Most importantly, Cal possessed a bona fide star in Allen Crabbe, a contender for the Naismith Player of the Year. Crabbe, who pulled down the Pac-12 Player of the Year award, averaged 18.7 points and 6.0 rebounds per game in the regular season. When the offense set broke down, Crabbe was able to rise up against shorter defenders and create higher percentage shots than his teammates in isolation situations.

The combination of a capable and intelligent distributor, a stout defense, and a legitimate NBA-prospect leading the offense passes the smell test of a team with the ability to take down any team in college basketball. So when the Bears shut down Rebels’ star forward Anthony Bennett and Crabbe and Cobbs respectively performed their individual roles to near perfection, it’s difficult to see it as much of an upset.

Cal was underseeded as a 12. That isn’t the tournament committee’s fault, however. It would have been outside the committee’s jurisdiction and power to seed a team based solely on their late-season performance. But at the same time, Cal down the stretch resembled a 3 or 4 seed.

They took down Oregon twice, which flexed its defensive muscles against an incredibly talented Oklahoma State in a tournament win. Thursday afternoon. They demolished UCLA by more than 20 points, a team littered with future NBA stars. And they took down an Arizona team on the road that spent most of the season ranked in the top-10 teams in the country. All of these wins occurred within the month of February, leading up to the Big Dance.

Most national pundits will see the Bears’ win on Thursday as a major upset, a flukey out-of-nowhere comet from outer space. Look at the numbers and trends, though, and one emerges with a completely different story.

Contact Michael Rosen at mrosen@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @michaelrosen3.

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Tony Zhou/Senior Staff

SAN JOSE — Allen Crabbe clapped his hands, pointed to the crowd and pulled up his jersey, biting the top of it so the “California” on his chest was visible for all to see.

Four days after Crabbe talked about the Cal men’s basketball team’s opportunity to put its name back out there, the Bears did just that on Thursday with a 64-61 win over UNLV in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.

Cal (21-11) missed four of six free throws down the stretch to allow the Runnin’ Rebels (25-10) to pull within two, but Crabbe, the Pac-12 Player of the Year, sunk a pair with 1.6 seconds left to ice the upset. The 12th-seeded Bears advance to the round of 32 to face Syracuse Saturday at 6:40 p.m.

“The kids really had a proper attitude coming into this,” said Cal coach Mike Montgomery. “We played really hard. I don’t think there was a fear factor … We felt like we could win.”

Crabbe led a balanced offensive attack for Cal with 19 points. Meanwhile, Anthony Bennett, whose monstrous 25-point performance led to the Rebels’ one-point win over Cal back in December, was a nonfactor on Thursday. He scored 15 points on 4-of-11 shooting, struggling to get touches against the Bears’ zone defense.

“I was told to crowd him every time he catches it and faces up,” said forward David Kravish. “In the post, I just put my arms up, and he couldn’t get it over me or I blocked it.”

This was not your typical 12-5 upset. The Bears, playing at nearby HP Pavilion, looked like a team that expected to win, and UNLV was playing catchup for much of the contest.

Unlike in its Pac-12 Tournament quarterfinal loss to Utah, Cal was fired up to start the contest. The Bears got steals on the first two possessions and scored the game’s first seven points.

“We always talk about the first five minutes, as they are the most important,” said Justin Cobbs, who tallied 13 points and six assists on the evening. “It gave us momentum for the rest of the game.”

Forward Richard Solomon was particularly energized, as he led Cal with nine points at the half, including a spinning fadeaway jumper and a rare 3-pointer. Bryce Dejean-Jones and Katin Reinhardt shot a combined 4-for-8 from 3-point range to keep the halftime score even at 28.

Cal opened the second half with a 9-3 run, with Crabbe scoring the first two buckets on curls. Justin Cobbs nailed a 3-pointer to cap off the spurt before UNLV called timeout. The Rebels immediately tied the game at 37 with six unanswered, including another trey from Reinhardt.

Then the Bears went to work, scoring eight in a row. Crabbe continued to be aggressive on offense, and Cobbs nailed a three to keep his team’s lead at eight with 12 minutes remaining.

With no production inside, UNLV continued to shoot from the perimeter in the second half, but Reinhardt and Dejean-Jones cooled off considerably. While the Rebels were taking contested jumpers early in the shot clock instead of working the ball in to Bennett, Cal’s guards were finding center Robert Thurman for four consecutive dunks, slowly building up a lead.

With the Bears up 60-53 with under one minute to go, the game would come down to free throws — and Cal almost blew it. Cobbs and Crabbe both missed front ends of one-and-ones. Then Tyrone Wallace missed two, followed by one from Cobbs. But Cal was fouling too, forcing a lethal outside-shooting team to get its points one at a time. The strategy worked.

“It wasn’t always smooth,” Montgomery said. “(But) we never got to where we were down and out and whatever we were trying to do didn’t work.”

Jonathan Kuperberg covers men’s basketball. Contact him at jkuperberg@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanKupe.

The post Cal men’s basketball upsets UNLV, 64-61, in NCAA Tournament second round in San Jose appeared first on The Daily Californian.

This post will update throughout the day, as we provide you second round action of the NCAA Tournament from HP Pavilion in San Jose.

Jonathan Kuperberg covers men’s basketball. Contact him at jkuperberg@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanKupe.

The post NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Second Round: San Jose Region appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Michael Tao/File

Last year, Justin Cobbs did not watch any of the NCAA Tournament’s opening weekend games.

After South Florida crushed the Cal men’s basketball team in the play-in game, the Bears’ point guard did not feel like watching basketball for the next week. The wound was still fresh. Still is.

The one-and-done format is part of what makes March Madness so great, but there is another side of it that Cobbs and Cal know all too well. As coach Mike Montgomery said, “there are no do-overs. There is no next game unless we earn the next game.”

“If that doesn’t get your mind going,” Cobbs said, “knowing your season can be over just like that … ” He trails off. “I think we’re very conscious of what’s at stake.”

In arguably the best matchup possible for a 12 seed, the Bears (20-11) open the NCAA Tournament Thursday at 4:27 p.m. in nearby San Jose against a fifth-seeded UNLV team that barely beat Cal earlier in the season.

While Montgomery quipped that it might be faster to fly from Las Vegas than fight through traffic on Interstate 880, the players are excited about what they call a “home” game at HP Pavilion. They are also looking to get the bad taste out of their mouth from their 76-75 loss to the Runnin’ Rebels (25-9) back on Dec. 9.

At Haas Pavilion, Cal rode a balanced, efficient offensive effort to a one-point lead with 11 seconds remaining. Cobbs blocked UNLV point guard Anthony Marshall’s shot attempt, but forward Quintrell Thomas scooped up the airball and laid it in just before the buzzer.

“The layup, that’s all I remember,” said Cal forward Richard Solomon. “Walking into the locker room, we were all really mad. We felt like they got away with one.

“We got a little chip on our shoulders.”

The Bears will have to rebound from their late-season slide to avenge the loss and advance to the round of 32 to face either Syracuse or Montana.

After a seven-game win streak fueled by defense, Cal let the Pac-12 championship slip away with a poor defensive effort in its regular-season finale loss to Stanford. The team claimed it had gotten over it but showed little improvement in a stunning 79-69 overtime loss to No. 10 seed Utah in the Pac-12 Tournament quarterfinals last Thursday.

Solomon said some of the players took the Utes for granted. “We thought it would be easy,” he said.

They know the Rebels won’t be. Forward David Kravish said the Bears will get “embarrassed” if they come out flat.

Cal will need to figure out how to stop the 6-foot-8, 240-pound freshman forward Anthony Bennett, a projected top-10 pick in the 2013 NBA Draft, who destroyed Cal at Haas Pavilion with 25 points and 13 rebounds. The Bears will not be able to double team Bennett too much, according to Montgomery. “UNLV’s got too many (other) guys capable of scoring 20 points,” he said.

While the matchup may seem seem perfectly scripted for a Cal upset, the Bears are still a 12 seed playing a 5 seed. And while the December loss is still on Cal’s minds, Thursday’s rematch is less about revenge and all about living to fight another day.

“When it’s tournament time, anybody can beat anybody,” Cobbs said. “If you’re playing well at the right time, playing the right way, doing the right things, you can beat anybody. So if we stay focused and believe, the sky’s the limit for us.”

Jonathan Kuperberg covers men’s basketball. Contact him at jkuperberg@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanKupe.

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If something’s too good to be true, then it probably is.

When the Cal men’s basketball team was slated as the No. 12 seed in the East Regional during the Selection Show on Sunday, narratives emerged immediately.

The team’s opponent is UNLV, who beat the Bears by one point in December. Cal has turned its season around since its mediocre nonconference campaign. The current roster has come a far way since.

The location of the event is San Jose, only 46 miles south of Berkeley. With Cal fans expected to fill up HP Pavilion, the neutral venue ought to transform into Haas Pavilion South.

It’s tailor-made for a story that suggests Cal is going to pull off the upset. But many times, these narratives are superficial and incorrect. It misleads the readers by planting unwarranted hopes and ideas.

The Bears’ odds have been bloated by hard-to-support fluff, especially on three fronts.

First, Cal’s nail-biting loss to the Runnin’ Rebels at Haas Pavilion last December was a heartbreaker for the Bears, sure. But it’s no hard proof that backs up the point that they can do that again.

The most important difference between now and Dec. 9 is the presence of UNLV forward Mike Moser. Five minutes into the contest, he dislocated his shoulder and was out for three weeks.

The Rebels’ lineup was in disarray sans Moser. Last year, Moser, who transferred from UCLA, showed his potential as a quick, explosive forward who could rebound (according to kenpom.com, Moser was ninth in the nation in defensive rebounding percentage in 2011-12 and shoot 3-pointers.

The Mike Moser of yesteryear has yet to return this year. But it’s impossible to ignore the forward, considering that Cal’s frontcourt is the team’s Achilles’ heel.

The Bears, to an extent, banked on Moser’s misfortune to hang with the Rebels in December. Can they do it again with Moser on the court?

Second, Cal’s turnaround this season and its supposed “hot hand.” Personally, I believe momentum is extremely overrated, a term thrown around by sportswriters to construct sandcastle narratives.

However, if we are going to talk about momentum, let’s talk about the Bears’ last two games. Small sample size arguments aside, the losses to Stanford and Utah has been uncharacteristic of the new-look Cal team, which has emphasized defensive tenacity. During their seven-game winning streak from Feb. 10 to March 2, the Bears allowed around 56 points per game. In the last two tilts, they allowed 81 points per game.

If there are any momentum swings going on, it’s that Cal has been losing its luster as the season dwindles down.

Third, the “home” advantage. Statistically, home teams do win more games. But San Jose, no matter how draped in blue and gold it may be on Thursday, is not home. It’s not Haas Pavilion.

The geographical proximity narrative is also overblown. UNLV will be flying in from Las Vegas, just two hours away. The Selection Committee did an overall good job in eliminating geographical advantages, such as time zone differences, for all 68 teams.

If there are narratives to stir, they should be more statistical and analytical.

Intangibles and vague storylines rehashed by sportswriters for eons should be left out, for good.

Seung Y. Lee covers men’s basketball. Contact him at sylee@dailycal.org Follow him on Twitter @sngyn92.

The post Breaking down the superficial narratives appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Tony Zhou/Staff

Even after losing its last two games, the Cal men’s basketball team was all but assured of a second straight NCAA tournament bid. The Bears were rewarded for their overall body of work with a 12 seed in San Jose, where they will face UNLV on Thursday at 4:27 p.m. in the round of 64.

Cal (20-11) has now gone dancing in four of Mike Montgomery’s five years as coach. The Bears are one of five Pac-12 teams to make the tournament, this just one year after Cal was the only team in the league to receive an at-large bid.

“We really feel like we can do this,” said Allen Crabbe. “We can really put our name back out there.

“I don’t really look at the seeds, you got to look at the matchup.”

And the matchup does seem favorable. Besides the fact that the Bears don’t have to leave the Bay Area, they are facing a UNLV squad they nearly beat at Haas Pavilion on Dec. 9. Down one, the Runnin’ Rebels rebounded their own air ball and scored with one second left to win, 76-75

“I remember missing that final rebound,” said forward David Kravish. ”We had that game.”

Led by Pac-12 Player of the Year Crabbe and All-Pac-12 second-team point guard Justin Cobbs, the Bears accumulated five top-50 RPI wins throughout the season en route to a second-place finish in the league. They were shocked by No. 10 seed Utah in Thursday’s Pac-12 tournament quarterfinals, a game forward Richard Solomon said some players took for granted. That left the entire weekend for them to ponder their seeding.

The consensus was that Cal would for sure receive an at-large bid, but as Montgomery said, “Nobody knows.” He said there was some apprehension after Oregon, the Pac-12 tournament champion, was surprisingly given a 12 seed in the first bracket announced. That was nothing compared to last year, when Cal sweated out the Selection Show, waiting until the very end to learn that the squad was in the play-in round, where it lost badly to South Florida.

“It seems so much more manageable,” Montgomery said of play nearby on Thursday. “I think our attitude will be good going into the game. I think we’ll be fired up and ready to play. Whether that’s enough, we’ll see. I don’t think we’ll go in not knowing what they’re capable of and what we have to do to give us a chance.”

Despite being picked to finish third in a rejuvenated conference and winning their first six games of the season, the Bears looked like an NIT team at best in mid-January, having lost at home to Harvard before starting 2-3 in league play.

Then, on Feb. 2, Cal beat No. 10 Oregon at Haas Pavilion. A week later, Cal beat No. 7 Arizona in Tucson. It was the first of seven straight victories, including a blowout of UCLA and another win over the Ducks, this time in Eugene. While the Bears blew a shot at a share of the Pac-12 title with a regular season-ending loss to Stanford, they had already done enough to warrant a ticket to the Big Dance.

“We just really have to cherish this moment, we can’t let it go to waste,” Crabbe said. “I don’t want this season to be over with on Thursday.”

Jonathan Kuperberg covers men’s basketball. Contact him at jkuperberg@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanKupe.

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Semifinal action of the Pac-12 tournament from the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas

Jonathan Kuperberg covers men’s basketball. Contact him at jkuperberg@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanKupe.

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Michael Tao/Senior Staff

LAS VEGAS —  It did not matter that the Cal men’s basketball team had beaten Utah twice comfortably during the regular season. The Pac-12 tournament is a completely different animal.

In a tournament chalk full of down-to-the-wire action, the Bears’ Thursday quarterfinal matchup was no exception, as the tenth-seeded Utes forced overtime before inexplicably shocking No. 2 seed Cal, 79-69.

The Bears (20-11), who lost to Stanford to end the regular season, will stew over their late-season collapse while waiting until Sunday afternoon to find out their NCAA tournament fate.

“Upsets happen,” said Allen Crabbe. “We can’t do anything about it now. We just got to come together as a group and focus on whatever’s next for us.”

Crabbe may have been the Pac-12 Player of the Year, but Utah’s Jarred DuBois was the best player on the court. DuBois, who scored 21 points on 8-of-13 shooting, sunk a 3-pointer with four seconds left in regulation to send the game to overtime.

“Once I saw JD hit that shot, I felt like I had to back him up,” said Utah forward Jordan Loveridge, who scored eight of his 20 points in overtime. “We’re right there. Why not go out and get it?”

The Utes (15-17) scored a whopping 20 points in overtime against a Cal squad that had been stout defensively until its last two games. The Bears’ 15 offensive rebounds could not make up for allowing Utah to shoot 47.3 percent from the floor.

At the MGM Grand Garden Arena, in front of a crowd with considerably more Utah fans, Cal seemed to be on cruise control against the Utes, who were coming off an upset of USC the previous night.

Cal was playing catchup for most of the first half, perhaps a little rusty in its first game since a stinging loss to Stanford more than a week ago. The Utes started the game off hot, as DuBois, coming off his 22-point explosion the day before, poured in eight points in the first three and a half minutes.

“We didn’t do enough to take that confidence away from them,” said Cal coach Mike Montgomery of Utah’s quick start. “All of a sudden we were in for a tough ball game.”

The Bears never fell too far behind; in fact, they held Utah scoreless for nearly seven minutes early in the second half, scoring eight in a row to take a 44-36 lead. That was Cal’s chance to gain a commanding cushion, and the Bears did not take advantage.

The Utes came right back with an 8-2 streak of their own to erase most of Cal’s lead. Back-to-back 3-pointers from Loveridge actually put Utah ahead, 50-48, with under seven minutes remaining.

“Some of the decisions we made, in a time when we couldn’t afford to make a mistake, ended up really costing us,” Montgomery said.

The game was neck and neck until Justin Cobbs drilled a 3-pointer with just under two minutes remaining, the apparent dagger. Crabbe made three of four free throws down the stretch, but Cal’s lead was only three, leaving the door open for DuBois.

Montgomery admitted after the game that he made a mistake and should have called a timeout to tell his team to foul on that final possession of regulation.

“When it went to overtime, their confidence went sky high, and I think our chin went to our chest,” he said.

Cobbs and Crabbe led Cal with 26 and 21 points, respectively. No other Cal player reached double digits.

Jonathan Kuperberg covers men’s basketball. Contact him at jkuperberg@dailycal.org. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanKupe.

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