With Isaiah Mobley out, Drew Peterson and 'a little bit of swagger' stepped up against UCLA - uscannenbergmedia.com

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Drew Peterson accepted the handoff, dribbled twice to his right, took a few steps backward, sized up his defender and ordered everyone else to get the hell out of his way.

That’s not a direct quote — probably — but it surely was the vibe.

Peterson approached that defender (redshirt senior forward Cody Riley), unleashed upon him a sequence of dribble moves (one between-the-legs crossover in each direction and one right-to-left behind-the-back move, in no particular order), caught UCLA in a botched defensive switch, found himself behind the 3-point line, declined to think twice about it, and fired.

He made it, of course.

Peterson held his finish, turned toward the Galen Center crowd, put a finger in the air and said the one thing which everyone was thinking but which only he could put so eloquently, the words rolling off the tongue like a snippet of Shakespearean poetry:

“Oh, shit.”

Again:

“Oh, shit.”

Indeed.

That was the moment Peterson identified postgame as the moment he knew he was — for lack of a better term — on one. “I think that was where I was just like, ‘Oh,’” he said. (He omitted the other word.)

The 27-point performance Peterson dished out in USC’s win was essentially that moment, elongated and sprinkled homogeneously over 38 minutes of basketball. That moment, with five-and-a-half minutes remaining, was about more than just the three-point margin that wound up as the difference on the scoreboard once the clock hit triple zeros and the court invasion began; it was about the attitude Peterson brought to the table the entire night, without which his Trojans might have learned a quite different fate.

“Obviously I’ve got my confidence back,” Peterson said, after going 8-for-31 across his previous four games including a goose egg on 12 attempts from three. “And a little bit of swagger.”

USC desperately needed that swagger, as well as the production it summoned. That much was obvious when USC’s best player, junior forward Isaiah Mobley, showed up to the biggest game of the season dressed in street clothes. He was held out due to concussion symptoms onset by a nose-breaking hit against Arizona a week ago.

But some of Mobley’s best qualities — the lack of which made USC an even bigger underdog before tip-off — were evident in No. 13, who, in a sense, allowed Mobley to live vicariously through him in more ways than one. He took on the rebounding burden, grabbing a game-high 12 boards in the absence of USC’s leading rebounder. He took on the interior defensive burden, swatting Bruin shot attempts left and right for a game-high five blocks — a category in which Mobley ranked second on the team entering the evening. He clamped junior guard Johnny Juzang, UCLA’s leading scorer on the season who scored 12 points on 4-of-16 shooting.

And of course, Peterson took on the scoring burden, more than doubling the next-most prolific Trojan in the absence of their leading scorer, and doing so on ridiculously efficient rates of 9-for-13 from the field and 4-for-5 from downtown.

“We were talking as a staff this afternoon once Isaiah was ruled out,” head coach Andy Enfield said postgame. “We just said someone has to step up. And Drew certainly did that … He did everything. He looked like a superstar out there. He was so good … When he’s confident and he’s playing with that level of intensity, he’s awfully hard to stop.”

Apparent in Peterson on Saturday night was the kind of playmaking ability that USC has occasionally lacked ever since losing Evan Mobley and Tahj Eaddy to the NBA Draft this offseason. At times, it’s hurt them. Take last Saturday’s loss to Arizona, for instance, when the Trojans held a six-point lead in the closing minutes but bricked 14 of their last 15 shots to let slip a statement road conference win against a top-five opponent.

With Mobley out of the fold Saturday — and with USC’s second-leading scorer in junior guard Boogie Ellis dropping exactly zero points on seven field goal attempts — someone else had to be the guy for USC to avoid a similar outcome to that game Tucson. Situations like this will arise again, and someone will again have to be that guy.

On Saturday, Peterson showed perhaps more than ever before that that guy can be him, and beyond the significance of the win itself — moving USC into second in the Pac-12 standings, claiming the Crosstown Showdown and all the accompanying bragging rights for the fifth consecutive time — Saturday offered a glimpse into the kind of playmaking and putting-the-team-on-my-back ability that USC will need in order to contend for the Pac-12 title or approximate last year’s Elite Eight run.

“We really had to prove to ourselves that we could get a statement win like this,” Peterson said. “Beating a good ranked opponent like that is just awesome for our momentum going into the rest of the season and March.”

Saturday’s win was crucial not just in terms of what USC did, and not just in terms of what it showed USC can do — most importantly, it showed how USC can do it. Perhaps it doesn’t have to be Mobley or Ellis every night. Perhaps it can be Peterson who steps up when the lights are the brightest, the stage the biggest, the stakes the highest.

After all, that swagger Peterson referenced — the swagger he brought to that 3-pointer from the right wing against Riley — if he can maintain that swagger moving forward, and if the shotmaking follows that swagger, a simple two-word phrase comes to mind.

Hint: Peterson said it himself on Saturday night. Multiple times, actually.

“Oh, shit.”

Oh, shit, indeed.

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The Link Lonk


February 14, 2022 at 03:36AM
https://www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2022/02/13/with-isaiah-mobley-out-drew-peterson-and-a-little-bit-of-swagger-stepped-up-against-ucla/

With Isaiah Mobley out, Drew Peterson and 'a little bit of swagger' stepped up against UCLA - uscannenbergmedia.com

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