Pepperdine Repays San Diego in Victory : Basketball: Waves win, 75-69. Lopez clinches game with free throws.

With the nation’s second-longest winning streak on the line--in this case, the free-throw line--Pepperdine’s smallest player, Damin Lopez, made two shots with 24 seconds left to secure a 75-69 West Coast Conference victory over the University of San Diego.

It was a pay-back. San Diego beat the Waves, 91-88, on Jan. 11 when Geoff Probst, San Diego’s shortest player, made his first free throw of the season.

“They were about the same,” Pepperdine Coach Tom Asbury said of the two games, “except Lopez is about a 90% free-throw shooter, and that was Probst’s first of the year.”

That loss was Pepperdine’s last. Since then, the Waves have beaten every WCC opponent and have won 13 in a row. Only Nevada Las Vegas, with 36, has a longer winning streak.

Geoff Lear had 18 points and seven rebounds and Doug Christie 17 points and seven assists to lead the Waves.

Kelvin Woods, a 6-foot-5 junior forward, scored 17 points for San Diego.

In a tight game throughout--neither team had more than a six-point lead--Pepperdine led, 67-65, with less than three minutes left. Christie then made a six-foot hook shot with 2:22 left and Lear sank a five-foot baseline jump shot with 1:41 remaining to make the score 71-65.

San Diego’s Anthony Thomas, who scored 12 points, then made a layup, and after Rex Manu made one of two free throws, Thomas sank a 12-footer from the baseline with 27 seconds left to make the score 72-69.

Pepperdine already had clinched its sixth WCC regular-season title in 11 years. It was Asbury’s first in three years.

The Waves celebrated by throwing Asbury into the shower and then into the swimming pool outside the San Diego Sports Center.

“You almost think we did something tonight,” a smiling Asbury said.

They beat San Diego for the sixth time in the past seven meetings.

“That was a nice win, a real nice win,” Asbury said. “It could have been easy for our guys to say ‘Hey, we clinched it!’ But we didn’t do that.”

A third meeting between these schools is possible in the WCC tournament. Pepperdine (19-8, 13-1) is the No. 1-seeded team and will play Portland Saturday.

San Diego, which has lost four in row, fell to 16-11 and 8-6 to drop into third place in the WCC. Loyola Marymount, which has won 10 in a row, has overtaken the Toreros.