LOS ANGELES — Blood spurted angrily from Wesley Yates III’s nose, for four minutes of game clock, marooned in the caverns of the Galen Center.
On Tuesday morning, USC men’s basketball coach Eric Musselman left his house convinced his program would play against Penn State without two of its three top scorers. He had told his wife Danyelle as much, in fact. Chibuzo Agbo Jr. was so sick he had missed one of the week’s practices to receive IV fluids, and Musselman had to hold himself back from freaking out that his best shooter was missing game prep. Yates, USC’s ascending freshman, had caught the same bug. To make matters worse, point guard Desmond Claude was coming off a two-game absence with a knee injury.
To make matters much worse: Yates got whacked in the first half against Penn State, immediately snatched a towel to his face, and went straight to the locker room with what Musselman believed to be a broken nose.
But this a program built by a head coach whose late father Bill Musselman, a legendary head coach, once preached: when in a tough spot, play your toughest guys. And they were tough, Claude said after the game. They were all tough.
And through electrolyte-boosted sweat, through blood on the hardwood, USC’s offense looked as healthy as it had all season in a 92-67 blowout of Penn State.
Claude played 36 of 40 minutes, finishing with a brutal eight turnovers but sparking USC’s attack all night with 14 points on 5-of-6 shooting. Yates played 36, himself, never coming off the court outside of that first-half blow and finishing with 13 points on 5-of-8 shooting. Agbo went nuclear, in a flu game to be remembered, teeing off from the corners with 21 points and a career-best seven 3-pointers on a night when the Trojans shot a blistering 67% from the field.
“We knew this was a very important game,” Claude said. “So we had to dig deep within ourselves, and lock in.”
This was no marquee matchup. This was important, ultimately, for sheer survival. Penn State came in at the bottom of the Big Ten, and yet somehow ahead of USC (14-10 overall, 6-7 Big Ten) in the NCAA’s NET ranking. A loss to the Nittany Lions (13-12, 3-11) meant bye-bye to most any chance at the NCAA Tournament, and Musselman conveyed to his roster that Tuesday’s game was a must-win.
The only problem: that roster was decimated. So much so that Musselman canceled the day’s shootaround, turning it into a makeshift walkthrough, with three starters in the midst of rehab.
“I mean, it’s a game that I’ll remember for a while,” Musselman said, “just because of how unsure we were about what was going on.”
Claude’s presence was the key, USC missing its initiator desperately in the previous week’s losses to Northwestern and Purdue. He had suffered a bone bruise in USC’s victory over Michigan State on Feb. 1, his knee swelling for the week to come. Musselman told reporters that Claude could have been “out three weeks,” and was getting such constant rehab that he had taken his team lunch Tuesday straight to the trainer’s room.
The knee looked plenty fine, though, as Claude Euro-stepped around big men and finished reverse layups and hit a pretty sidestep 3-pointer in a virtuoso performance: eight turnovers, but eight assists and 14 points on 5-of-6 shooting. His sheer presence attacking the lane suddenly opened a missing world of space for Musselman’s offense, the ball singing around the perimeter and finding cutters inside, a 40-31 halftime lead nothing compared to the avalanche that was still to come.
For 11 minutes in the second half, the Trojans didn’t miss a single shot from the floor.
Agbo entered Tuesday night carrying a 20% mark from 3-point range in his past six games. And an illness. But he busted a slump with a 3-pointer early in the second half that doinked off the front of the rim and dropped home, a nod from the basketball gods.
He hit three more within the span of four minutes, all catch-and-shoot looks generated off drives from Thomas and Claude. Yates added a nasty step-back 3-pointer, flashing a youthful grin on his way back down the court. On one inbound play, Claude broke a trap to find Yates, who touch-tapped to a streaking Thomas, who tic-tac-toed right back to Yates, who dashed down the lane to find a cutting Cohen for a layup on a play that would have made James Naismith smile somewhere.
Center Josh Cohen, tabbed again as a starter after losing the job to backup Rashaun Agee, played his most minutes (21) since Jan. 4 in limiting the 6-foot-10 Yanic Konan Niederhauser, Penn State’s second-leading scorer, to one point and one rebound. Agbo banged home a few more 3-pointers, and fellow diseased Yates added a couple of second-half layups.
And USC walked away from the Galen Center with its season very much alive and well.