TEMPE – The most memorable thing Derrick Williams may have caught all night was not an alley-oop pass but … the net.
“It caught in the net and stung it pretty bad,” Williams said of his famously sprained pinky, “but other than that it was fine.”
Williams didn’t get an array of alley-oop passes because the Sun Devils collapsed on him intensely after Williams scored 31 points in part by hitting 15 of 16 free throws against ASU last month at McKale Center.
“They were going to attack the middle, and I just had to look for my teammates today,” Williams said. “That’s the good thing about our team – we’re not a one-man team. We did a great job.
So Williams, basically, became a decoy of sorts. He took just five field goals and three free throws for the game, while Jesse Perry (4 for 11) and Kyle Fogg (7 for 13) each put up more than double the shots he did.
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“Derrick always deserves credit and part of the credit he deserves is when teams really try to collapse on him, sometimes his presence alone can open up some shots for his teammates,” Sean Miller said. “But it’s up to them to make them and Kyle did take advantage of those.”
Miller said the Wildcats could have done a better job of getting the ball to Williams, but also said Williams’ five fouls in the second half were not a sign of good defense.
“Derrick didn’t have one of his best games, especially defensively -- five fouls in one half, that’s not a good thing,” Miller said. “I don’t mean that in a negative light to anyone other than Derrick. We have to keep getting him to concentrate and play hard so he stays out of foul trouble. But he’s been a rock solid great player for us and it’s really nice to see some of his teammates step up.”
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With a one-game lead in the Pac-10 race, Miller said he wasn’t looking too far ahead. Not even to Saturday’s UA-Washington showdown:
“When you’re trying to win a championship or you’re late in February, there’s no game that means more than the next one,” he said. “We play Washington on Saturday, we play the same price winning or losing Washington State (on Thursday) as well as Washington. We’re in a conference race and we have four of the next six at home. We certainly want to take advantage of that. But at the same time, for us to make any game bigger than the next is not really the case.
“It’s one of the reasons we’ve been consistent with our winning, we’ve not tried to put the cart before the horse. It’s important we have a couple of really great days of practice. We don’t have a real mature team. We don’t have great leadership, and we always walk that fine line of being who we’ve been or changing -- when you see us change we’ll lose. Sometimes in a game you can kind of sense that.”
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Miller said it was great to see the UA fans at Wells Fargo Arena. Of the near-capacity crowd of 10,189, about 20 percent or so were wearing red.
“Phoenix is an important city for us,” Miller said. There’s “our history here with our great former players and some guys here on our current team, so we all recognized the importance of this game here and I’m happy we can come down here and win."
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The Sun Devils dropped to 1-11 in Pac-10 play but Miller defended them and coach Herb Sendek.
“Their fans have no reason to panic,” Miller said. “Watching Herb do what he has from Day 1, and taking their program a year ago to where one possession could have put them in the NCAA tournament…. Sometimes seasons happen like this.
“There’s so much more parity and when you’re decimated by injuries, I don’t care who you are, it’s just no one had that room for error that maybe we once did. I’m very confident in saying we will have our hands full playing against ASU down the stretch and next year and beyond.”
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Here's the official boxscore and play by play.
Our coverage, if you missed any of it: The game story, a sidebar on Kyle Fogg, some seen-and-heard notes, Greg Hansen's column on ASU's situation, and a photo gallery.
