Half good, half bad: Ugly stretch quickly brings down 'clinic'

BOB HOLT
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

AUBURN, Ala. -- Arkansas Coach Nolan Richardson said after Saturday's game at Auburn he knew "there were going to be some days we'll look pretty good, and some we're going to look very ugly."
But Richardson never could have imagined his young Razorbacks could look so good and so ugly in the same game.
The good-looking Razorbacks played the first half but the ugly took over in the second as they fell to 10th-ranked Auburn 73-55 before a sellout crowd of 10,500 at Beard-Eaves Memorial Coliseum.
"The game was a tale of two halves," Richardson said. "The first half, to me, was the best we've played. It was a clinic of what we're trying to do and how I thought we might play before it's over with.
"The second half was how not to play basketball."
Arkansas (11-10, 3-5) shot 51.7 percent in the first half, including hitting 8 of 13 three-pointers, in taking a 39-35 lead.
In the second half, the Razorbacks shot 4 of 27 from the field, and needed to heat up at the end to do that. They opened 2 of 22 from the field in the second half -- including missing five shots on one possession -- before hitting two of their last five attempts.
"It was like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type of thing," Arkansas senior guard Chris Walker said. "We came out good and finished up bad."
Part of Arkansas' collapse resulted from Auburn (19-3, 7-2) turning up its intensity after falling behind.
"Our second-half performance was outstanding," Tigers Coach Cliff Ellis said. "We played about as well as we can play. We had awesome, awesome defense."
But the Razorbacks aided Auburn's comeback with numerous unforced turnovers and poor shot selection at times, in addition to missing good looks.
"We just got really out of sync," Arkansas junior guard Brandon Davis said. "We start pressuring ourselves so into thinking, 'You've got to do this right now.' I felt we pushed the panic [button] a little bit.
"It wasn't so much what [Auburn] did, I think we just shot ourselves in the foot. That's not the first time we've done that."
Arkansas played without freshman guard Joe Johnson, who is averaging a team-high 13.8 points, because he was attending his grandmother's funeral.
"We missed Joe a lot," Davis said. "He's a cool player and a smart guy. You need a guy like that on the floor so when things start to get out of hand, you can look to him to slow everything down and get everybody back in sync."
The Razorbacks suffered a season-high 28 turnovers and several times lost the ball by slipping on the floor without even being touched.
"There were times I'm saying, 'God, all we've got to do is stand up. You know?' " Richardson said. "If we stand up, we've got a chance to do something. But at times we couldn't even stand up."
Auburn, which trailed by as many as 10 points at 35-25, began turning the game around late in the first half.
After officials consulted a television replay to determine that a Walker basket should be a two-pointer instead of a three-pointer, changing Arkansas' lead from 40-30 to nine points with 2:41 left, the Tigers outscored the Razorbacks 43-16.
The Tigers, who won their 29th consecutive home game, used a 19-5 run over a 9:14 span of both halves to go ahead 49-45 with 13:37 left.
Junior guard Scott Pohlman scored 15 of his game-high 21 points in that run, hitting four three-pointers, to put Auburn in control.
"I was just feeling good," said Pohlman, who matched his season high against Stanford. "I got some good looks and the ball was going in."
Pohlman kept getting open in transition, and Richardson said the Razorbacks did a poor job of keeping track of him.
"In the past when we saw a guy that would hit shots, he would be covered," Richardson said. "Our guys couldn't find [Pohlman] and he was able drift around."
Auburn senior forward Chris Porter had 20 points, but scored 14 in the final 13 minutes -- after the outcome had been decided -- with most coming on breakaways after Davis guarded him well for much of the game.
"Pohlman is the guy who bailed them out," Richardson said. "He hit some big threes and the game's momentum changed totally.
"The basket got bigger for them and got a lot smaller for the Razorbacks. Their heads went up high and the poor Razorback heads went low."
Sophomore guard Teddy Gipson, who led Arkansas with 12 points, said it didn't come as a shock that things got so low for the Razorbacks after their hot start.
"We haven't been a consistent team," Gipson said. "And that showed today."
More than ever.

This article was published on Sunday, February 6, 2000

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