Louisville shoots down DePaul

There's no shame in losing to a Louisville team that's making its trademark ascent with the NCAA Tournament in view.

It would have been a shame if DePaul had never competed with the 23rd-ranked Cardinals.

Thank goodness for freshman guard Dar Tucker's 65-second outbreak at the end of the first half Tuesday night at the Allstate Arena.

If not for Tucker's 8-point spree, which featured increasingly spectacular scores each time he touched the ball, the 4,000 DePaul fans who fought through the snow to get to Rosemont would have had nothing to show for their efforts.

Tucker's run cut Louisville's halftime lead to 8 points, but the Cardinals made an absurd 13 shots in a row to turn things into a laugher.

The Cardinals opened up a 31-point lead with 10:54 to go before settling for an 88-68 Big East victory that pulled them within 1 game of league leader Georgetown.

"Well, we can't play better than that," Louisville coach Rick Pitino said.

No kidding.

"I hope someday to have a basketball team like Rick has at Louisville," DePaul coach Jerry Wainwright said.

No kidding.

Junior forward Terrence Williams piled up 22 points, 8 rebounds and 5 assists, while senior center David Padgett kept hitting easy 4-foot jump hooks to finish with 20 points in 23 minutes.

Both Williams and Padgett made 9 of 12 shots as Louisville (19-6, 9-3) hit 58 percent from the field for the night.

"Coach just kept calling some sets for me and my teammates did a good job of getting me the ball when I was open," Padgett said.

When the Cardinals weren't pounding the ball inside to Padgett, their three-quarters-court press was forcing turnovers that led to easy baskets.

DePaul committed 5 turnovers in the first five minutes of the second half to help Louisville hit 14 of its first 15 shots.

"When you shoot a high percentage, you get your press on that many more times," Pitino said. "We were doing a very good job of pressing and it created that spurt. You only need one or two spurts off your press."

Louisville scored 27 points off DePaul's 16 turnovers, many of them layups.

"When you turn it over against them, it's points," Wainwright said. "They are the most efficient team at converting turnovers into points.

"We can't have the types of turnovers we had. We had a rash of really dumb mistakes where we made mistakes that are so outside of the fundamentals we practice."

Tucker led DePaul (10-14, 5-7) with 22 points in 25 minutes while Will Walker added 15.

Leading scorer Draelon Burns finished with 11, but he shot 3 of 14 and didn't hit his first basket until 10:31 remained and Louisville owned a 74-43 lead.

Now the Blue Demons, who are 1-7 against ranked teams, find themselves perilously close to falling into the bottom four of the Big East standings.