The fact that it doesn’t feel all that disappointing may be the most disheartening part. This Huskies men’s hoops season seems less off-kilter and more on brand.
The team is 12-9 overall and 4-6 in the Pac-12, sitting tied for seventh with two other teams in the bottom half of the standings.
It’s become the norm on Montlake, as the Dawgs went 20-38 in league play over their past three seasons (although they did scratch out a winning record at 11-9 last season).
The situation prompts a couple of questions at the halfway point in the conference schedule: 1) What has gone wrong in 2022-23? 2) What opportunity does these next two contests — home games against Arizona State on Thursday and No. 6 Arizona on Saturday — present for Washington’s fading chances to get back to the NCAA tournament?
To the first query — you can’t dismiss health as a factor. Senior guard Noah Williams injured himself 20 minutes into the first game of the season and didn’t return until late December. Center Franck Kepnang, meanwhile, hurt a knee vs. Oregon State at the start of last month and was ruled out for the rest of the season.
These were significant losses on a ball-handling/rebounding/rim-protection front, and you can’t blame folks for wondering what might have been had this squad been playing with a full roster all season.
“I believed at the beginning of the year, healthy … with everybody healthy, I really believed that we would be in the top three or four in the league, competitively,” Huskies coach Mike Hopkins said. “Obviously we wish we were 10-0 right now in league. We’ve had some good moments, we’ve had some bad moments where it looked like, ‘Oh my God,’ like the wheels just came off, but the one thing I’d tell you about these guys is that they’ve been really resilient.”
A couple things to note: Kepnang averaged 9.0 points, 6.3 rebounds and 1.9 blocks in his eight games this season. Good numbers, but not world-beating, can’t-survive-without-you statistics. And though the Huskies have won three of their past four, they dropped four in a row upon Williams’ return to the lineup.
But Hopkins wasn’t using injuries as an excuse for his team’s shortcomings this season. Asked about his initial reaction to the Huskies’ health issues, he responded, “That’s sports.” And though there have been stretches that might prompt optimism for this team, the bare-bones statistics aren’t promising.
During conference play, the Huskies are fourth in the Pac-12 in scoring but last in scoring defense. They are also seventh in rebounding and 11th in rebounds allowed. The Huskies have made a lot of threes — 76 in 10 league games, good for second in conference — but their 32.1 three-point percentage is seventh.
Most signs point to Washington finishing the season with another mediocre record and an outside-looking-in view of the NCAA tournament. But perhaps the Huskies’ best stretch of the season was that first game vs. Arizona, in which they led by seven with less than 12 minutes to go in Tucson. They eventually lost 70-67, but they showed that they could hang.
So at 12-9, facing Arizona State (15-5, 7-3) on Thursday and Arizona (17-3, 6-3) on Saturday — is this their last chance to position themselves for an NCAA tournament bid? What kind of opportunity is this?
“It’s unbelievable! Are you kidding me?” Hopkins said. “Our league is probably one of the strongest years since we’ve been here in six years, which is the greatest thing. Because they’re all opportunities.”
The point here was that it was harder in previous years to boost your résumé once conference play started if you were a Pac-12 team. The league was considered weak, so intraleague wins didn’t impress the selection committee much. It’s different now, but the Huskies still have loads of work to do.
If 20 wins is the magic number for tourney consideration, the Huskies probably have to go 7-3 the rest of the regular season and hope for a win in the Pac-12 tourney. And that comes with five opponents with winning conference records in front of them, including road games vs. USC and UCLA, who both smashed the Huskies at home a few weeks back.
Daunting task? Yes. Possible task? I think that’s a yes, too — just a far less emphatic one.
“Must win” is perhaps the most overused cliché in sports, but getting one of these next two seems essential. Hopkins might see it as an “unbelievable” opportunity, but it would be almost impossible to believe that Washington could get back to the Big Dance if it falls twice in the next three days.