Oregon basketball coach Dana Altman has asked Thursday night where the pride is among his veteran squad to not let something like this happen, especially this late in the season with the Ducks' NCAA tournament hopes very much in flux.

Altman didn't disagree with the question after watching his Ducks get outplayed in every facet on the way to a stunning 81-57 loss at Arizona State.

"I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of calls and texts from former players tonight and tomorrow asking the same question," Altman said. "I don't know. If I did, I'd massage it as much as I could. But our energy level was not what it should be. Our connection defensively was awful, and getting beat 11 on the boards, that's just effort. So there is a disconnect. I'm disappointed in myself we haven't been able to get more out of them because I know we're a better team than what we just demonstrated."

It's the second time in three games Oregon (17-9, 10-5 Pac-12) has lost an ugly one to a team in the bottom half of the conference standings, as Arizona State (9-15, 5-9) completes the sweep of the season series. Last Saturday, it was a 78-64 loss at home to Cal for the Ducks, who entered Thursday night as one ESPN analyst Joe Lunardi's projected "last four out" of the NCAA tournament field.

The Sun Devils -- one of the worst shooting teams in the country, ranked No. 344 out of 350 Div. 1 programs entering the day at 39.2 percent for the season -- shot 57.4 percent from the field Thursday, including 9 of 20 on 3-pointers. Oregon shot 5 of 26 from 3-point range, continuing a frustrating trend.

Arizona State also won the rebounding battle, 40-29, and utterly dominated the second half after going into halftime with a modest 36-30 lead.

One of those teams was playing with legit stakes and hopes for an NCAA tournament at-large bid, but it wasn't the one it would appear by those stats.

"We got outworked. For a team in that position, that's really disappointing. I'm not sure what to say," Altman said. "We've got obviously a very tough stretch coming up. We have to bounce back, have to try to get their heads right. But we haven't played well really the last four ballgames. Just ball movement, execution hasn't been very good and we've been outrebounded. Just a bad combination."

Altman thought the game was ultimately lost on two pivotal sequences.

Coming out of halftime with that six-point lead, Arizona State scored on its first three possessions -- a pair of DJ Horne buckets and a Jalen Graham jumper, sandwiched around a pair of Oregon timeouts. That pushed the deficit to 42-30 and prompted a quick timeout from Altman.

"I think the whole tone was set the first three buckets we gave up -- just real easy, no contest, just not enough energy," he'd say later.

And then midway through the half, Oregon used an 8-1 run spurred by 3-pointers from Will Richardson and Eric Williams Jr. and had a chance to get the deficit under 10 when Richardson then had another clean look from 3, but he couldn't hit it. ASU scored the next seven points and the game was never really close again.

"We just never got any momentum going after that. We didn't shoot it well, but we hung in there the first half, only down 6. We had some good looks that we didn't hit, but the second half we didn't get any stops, didn't get any rebounds, had nine turnovers. It was just a real poor performance," Altman said. "... I didn't think offensively our flow was very good, and the ball movement's really bad. That's on me. I mean, I can't get them to run anything. But that being said, when somebody shoots 58 percent against you and outrebounds you by 11, I'm not sure what you run offensively can make a difference. So it was all three phases of the game."

Richardson led Oregon with 12 points, but he was just 1 of 7 on 3-pointers, and Williams scored 11.

Graham had 18 points and 9 rebounds for Arizona State, and Horne, Kimani Lawrence and Marreon Jackson each scored 16.

The Ducks have a lot of work to do now if they want to play their way into the NCAA tournament, but they do still have some notable opportunities with a trip to No. 3 Arizona on Saturday followed by home games against No. 13 UCLA and No. 17 USC.

"We've got very tough opponents coming up. We're going to have to play a lot better," Altman said.