Fast forward to about the 9:00 mark to see the Cougars dumbly gag this one away. It was a ridiculously talented team possessing 2 future NBAers (one of whom also went on to play Major League Baseball) and a third guy who eventually became the leading scorer in school history. This result therefore constituted a gross underachievement.
This story doesn't have a whole lot of happy endings. This was Kelvin Sampson's last game as coach of W.S.U. He then went onto Oklahoma, where his team reached the Final Four but he ran afoul of the NCAA, then moved onto Indiana, where he ran so far afoul of the NCAA that there is currently a show-cause order against him – which is essentially a way of blackballing him from taking another college coaching job. He seemed to leave a mess whenever he left, and the W.S.U. program disintegrated over the course of the next 7-8 years.
Meanwhile, Tony Harris, who was W.S.U.'s best player and leader and who missed the free throw and committed the needless foul 35 feet from the basket with :05 left in the game and then flung the ball wildly at the basket at the game, went onto play in the NBA but then this happened in Brazil. Such a circumstance has always made it hard to approach this particular W.S.U. choke job with the necessary amount of humour.
