Trojans’ Latest Defeat Looks Familiar : USC: Stanford gets shaken up after trailing at halftime and rolls to 74-61 victory. Coleman breaks slump with 21 points.

Stanford basketball Coach Mike Montgomery was angry after watching his team play poorly in the first half of Saturday’s game against USC.

After Trojan guard Harold Miner sank a three-point shot with one second left in the first half to give USC a 34-32 lead, Montgomery grabbed Stanford guard Marcus Lollie, who had left Miner open, and flung Lollie off the court in anger.

“It was an overreaction on my part,” Montgomery said. “I thought we had a chance to get a little momentum going in and we let it slip away on that last shot.”

After Montgomery blew up, the Cardinal exploded in the second half, outscoring USC, 42-27, en route to a 74-61 Pacific 10 Conference victory before 5,200 at Maples Pavilion.

After beating No. 16 UCLA Thursday night, Stanford came out flat against USC. But the Cardinal outscored the Trojans, 23-9, in the first nine minutes of the second half to take control.

“This was probably a tougher game than many people thought,” Montgomery said. “We were not particularly aggressive in the first half and we didn’t seem to get our adrenaline going.”

But the Cardinal was flowing in the second half.

“Stanford has the physical size and they just wore us down,” USC Coach George Raveling said.

Guard John Patrick scored 12 of his team-high 17 points in the second half. Patrick hit five of nine three-point shots.

Center Adam Keefe added 15 points and Kenny Ammann and Deshon Wingate had 12 apiece. Forward Andrew Vlahov added 11 points.

The Cardinal (12-3, 4-2 in league play) also outrebounded the Trojans, 38-22. Keefe had a game-high 12 rebounds and Wingate had a season-high 11.

“Whatever they’re paying that weight training coach they ought to be giving him more, because he’s doing a helluva job,” Raveling said. “Stanford would look good at Muscle Beach.”

It was the same old story for USC (6-8, 1-6), which has wasted halftime leads in four of its past five games.

“One of the things that concerns me is that we’ve fallen into a pattern in our last four or five games of playing quality basketball for 20 minutes in a game that’s played for 40 minutes,” Raveling said. “If we were in a contest for 20 minutes, we’d probably be in the top 20 in the country right now, but unfortunately we play for 40 minutes.

“I’m not sure why we’re not able to sustain a 40-minute effort. We had this in the Notre Dame game, the Arizona game, the Cal game and this game. So I think what we as a staff have to do is to look at how we can sustain a 20-minute effort into a 40-minute effort.”

For the first time in 14 games, Raveling changed his starting lineup, inserting freshman Rodney Chatman at point guard in place of Robert Pack, who wasn’t doing a good job of directing the team.

Chatman celebrated his 20th birthday by scoring eight points and passing off for six assists in 33 minutes.

USC played as well as it can play in the first half, shooting 60.9% from the floor, hitting 14 of 23 shots.

But the Trojans were unable to shake Stanford, which trailed by two points despite shooting just 36.7% in the first half.

Forward Ronnie Coleman, who had scored only 24 points in his past three games, broke out of his slump by scoring 21 points--but only five in the second half. He has 1,001 points during his three-year USC career.

“I was glad to see him get back in his rhythm of things,” Raveling said. “He needed a good physical game like this where he got banged around inside.”