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Banchero and UW, where a little talent is a dangerous thing

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The top-shelf basketball talent from the Seattle area just keeps coming. A year after Jaden McDaniels became a five-star recruit, coaches from around the country are coveting 6-9 Paolo Banchero of O’Dea High in Seattle, a 2021 prospect that Rivals.com ranks as the No. 2 player in the nation. Among others, that has the interest of schools like Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky, Gonzaga and of course, Washington.

There’s a thick connection to Seattle and the University of Washington. Banchero’s mom Rhonda played at Washington from 1992-95 and is No. 6 on the school career scoring list and No. 8 in rebounding. His dad Mario played football at the UW. And of course, there’s the close culture of basketball players who grew up in the 206; in a recent interview with KING-TV, Banchero made reference to the legion of other players who have made the city one of the wellsprings of basketball talent in the nation.

Only circumstance lends any hint about where Banchero might want to go to school. He hasn’t publicly named a list of finalists (while he has visited the first four aforementioned), and both parents say they aren’t inclined to push him in any direction.

Not that any coaches ever slip a dollop of negative recruiting into their pitch, but for people like John Calipari of Kentucky and Mark Few of Gonzaga, and the longtime head men at Duke and North Carolina, Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams, it has to be tempting to point out to Banchero what kind of season the local team is having. Indeed, the 2019-20 UW struggles serve to underscore a much longer, deeper trend at Washington.

Over the years, nobody has frittered away high-end talent like Washington.

The numbers are startling. This is something I researched a few years ago, and with the Huskies bogged down in an eight-game losing streak and looking at a challenge even to get out of the Pac-12 cellar, the subject merits updating.

Back in 2006-07, Washington had seven-foot Spencer Hawes. It started 10-1 and skidded to 19-13 overall and 8-10 in the Pac-10. The Huskies didn’t play in the post-season and Hawes decided to take his gifts to the NBA after one year.

So I looked at specifically that phenomenon: Schools that since 2007, have had a player taken in the first round of the NBA draft, while the school failed to make the NCAA tournament that season.

It’s not a pretty picture on Montlake.

If, as expected, Washington fails to make the NCAA tournament – and now its chance is reduced to winning the Pac-12 tournament – and Isaiah Stewart and Jaden McDaniels get taken in the first round of the draft as widely expected, the Huskies will have had nine such first-round picks who didn’t get to the NCAA tournament that season since ’07.

As we speak, no other school in the country has more than three. That’s a stunning gap in a sport in which the bubble is regularly viewed as soft, and which affords a lot of opportunities to qualify for the NCAAs.

These are the instances at issue, and the Huskies’ post-season destination, since ’07:

2007 – Spencer Hawes (no post-season tournament).
2012 – Terrence Ross and Tony Wroten (NIT semifinals).
2014 – C.J. Wilcox (no tournament).
2016 – Marquess Chriss and Dejounte Murray (NIT second round).
2017 – Markelle Fultz (no tournament).

The phenomenon happens more than you might guess. Since 2007, there have been 70 instances of first-round picks not getting to the Big Dance that season, or about five a year. But if there are five more in June, and the Huskies don’t pull off a miracle run and Stewart and McDaniels are history at the UW, that would be nine of 75 belonging to Washington. For Washington to have more than eight percent of such cases, when there are 75 Power Six conference schools, is jaw-dropping.

Next-most such shortfalls is three by Indiana and Syracuse, UW coach Mike Hopkins’ old school. There are another 10 two-time offenders.

Put Hawes aside, and it’s even more stark. Since 2012, there are six Huskies who fall into this category over a mere eight seasons. Nationally, in that period there are 40 such cases, so the UW owns 15 percent of them. And it’s very likely to jump higher soon.

Then there’s this: The worst-case scenario – no NCAA and departures by Stewart and McDaniels – would mark the third time in that 14-year stretch that it’s happened to a tandem of Huskies the same season. Elsewhere, it’s happened only once, to Kentucky in 2013, and that carries a bit of an asterisk since Nerlens Noel, a first-round NBA selection that year, went down with a season-ending knee injury on Feb. 12.

How possibly to explain this?

This season, the Huskies can look to the ineligibility of guard Quade Green, which is reasonable to a point. But it’s also become a convenient catch-all for a team that had four losses by Jan. 2 with him.

You could also say that because seven (of the potential nine without a Big Dance ticket) are/were one-and-done players, it’s not as much a black mark on the Huskies as it is the NBA procedure of drafting on potential rather than production.

My sense is that more than anything, what did in Lorenzo Romar after a successful start at Washington was his inability to tame the beast that is Seattle-area talent – that is, not only being able to recruit it, but to recruit it selectively, to construct rosters that included it, and ultimately, to coach it.

What Romar did is not Hopkins’ fault, but after a two-year start and nothing but hosannas thrown his way, Hopkins is overseeing a badly underachieving season that evokes problems of his predecessor.

Who knows what Paolo Banchero might do? If his mindset is being one-and-done, he might well conclude that it’s not worth the uprooting to go cross-country, or even across the state, for eight or nine months’ apprenticeship for the NBA. He might decide the local connections he would make going to the UW would be beneficial when he’s done playing basketball. He might also figure he can be the guy who successfully bucks Washington’s lengthy, head-scratching trend.

One thing you can probably count on: He’s going to hear about that history from other coaches.
#godawgs #huskies #theslipperstillfits #uwhuskies #wcchoops #zagmbb

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The new UW hire and Seattle city hoops

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So the University of Washington has hired longtime Syracuse assistant Mike Hopkins, which is, at the very least, a provocative hire. Among other things, it tells me that UW athletic director Jennifer Cohen had been working this transition for awhile. You don’t just decide to fire Lorenzo Romar after the Huskies’ 13th straight loss in the Pac-12 tournament, and then commence a national search which lands on somebody other than a head coach.

At minimum, Cohen was working back channels days and weeks ago. Maybe about the time Gonzaga’s Przemek Karnowski rumbled down the floor and got behind the insouciant Husky defense for a layup in the Zags’ easy victory early in December.

Although Hopkins had been a candidate for other jobs on the West Coast, it’s an out-of-the-box hire. I went back through half a century of UW basketball appointments (six of them), and in every case at least since Mac Duckworth coached in the ‘60s, Washington always named a sitting head coach to the position. So it’s a bold move on Cohen’s part, and she deserves props for not doing the rote, pat thing, which is hiring the coach who happens to be making a hot NCAA-tournament run in front of millions of TV viewers who normally couldn’t tell you what state Purdue is in.

Still, it’s fraught with questions, partly for the same reason. There are major unknowns about any assistant coach.

To me, one of the most intriguing ones is the long-term fate of the abundant talent pool in Seattle. Of course, that’s a dynamic that directly impacts Gonzaga.

As I documented in “Glory Hounds,” (chapter 10), the Seattle inner-city market has remained mostly closed to Gonzaga, except on the rebound with transfers from Washington like Dan Dickau, Erroll Knight and Nigel Williams-Goss. It’s a confounding fact that the Zags have done more business in Chicago (Jeremy Pargo, Zach Norvell) than they have in recent years with high school kids in Seattle.

The Zags, and others, explain it as: Only a percentage of the available talent fits what Gonzaga does. And only a percentage of that group is interested in Gonzaga.

I can’t guess what goes through the minds of 18-year-olds, but my sense is that to most Seattle kids, Gonzaga is still an outlier in their world, no matter that the Zags have far outdistanced the Huskies as a basketball program.

Casey Calvary, the productive Gonzaga forward from Tacoma on teams that started this 19-year, NCAA-tournament streak, told me for Glory Hounds, “Dragging a Seattle kid away from the UW . . . they’ll go to the UW even though they know it’s a bad basketball decision. Like, ‘This is my town, all my buddies are around here, I’m a Seattle guy.’ ’’

I think Calvary hit the nail on the head. Yes, the UW is a powerful force in Seattle. Yes, the Huskies have put a flock of players into the NBA. And yes, Romar was a role-model figure skilled at recruiting.

In some cases, to choose the UW became the path of least resistance. After two waves of success keyed by people like Brandon Roy and Isaiah Thomas, the Huskies weren’t winning big (and in recent years, weren’t winning at all), but a recruit could rationalize: I can change that losing. And I can get to the NBA. And, at the very least, I’m with my homies.

The culture is thick, and dare I say, occasionally suffocating.

Years ago, Washington State got a summertime commitment from Mark McLaughlin from suburban Inglemoor High. Within a month, McLaughlin -- who would go on to an itinerant career that landed him briefly at Washington -- had bailed on the commitment. WSU’s staff, then under Tony Bennett, believed McLaughlin’s AAU buddies had dogged him for choosing a place that wasn’t hip.

Gary Bell Jr., who had a rock-solid career at Gonzaga, used to say that he got the same inquisition from AAU teammates and rivals in Seattle.

When Daejon Davis decommitted from Washington for a period and began canvassing other schools, one of the places he visited was Gonzaga. The Zags’ staff was of the opinion, gained either from Davis himself or by impression, that Washington was out of the picture. It wasn’t; he recommitted to the Huskies.

Under Romar, the trend of gaining recruits -- both local and national -- and losing games became almost unfathomable. Earlier this season, I researched the past 10 NBA drafts and discovered that Markelle Fultz will become the seventh Husky in that timeframe to be a first-round pick and not play in the NCAA tournament in the year in which he was drafted. Incredibly, no other school in the country had more than two.

Until Romar was cashiered last week, I was ready to forecast that Corey Kispert, the Gonzaga wing recruit from King’s High just north of Seattle, would leave a greater mark on his college program than Michael Porter Jr. would at Washington. Wherever Porter ends up, whether Missouri or elsewhere, let’s ride that proposition out.

Now it’s Hopkins’ job to retain the local talent. He has a reputation as a good recruiter, albeit minus Romar’s godfather persona in Seattle. The guess is, he’ll succeed with city kids. And Gonzaga will keep being Gonzaga.

Old habits die hard. If it does happen, maybe Hopkins will actually win with those guys.
#pac12hoops #theslipperstillfits #unitedwezag #uwhuskies #zagsmbb

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The Romar mess: One more AD bungles it

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A stony silence has emanated from the athletic offices at the University of Washington regarding the future of basketball coach Lorenzo Romar, and we can only assume that shortly, a puff of white or brown smoke will drift skyward from the Graves Building.

(This is a blog that usually addresses some aspect of Gonzaga basketball, but occasionally, will riff on other related topics in college hoops. And since the Zags have re-engaged with Washington on a four-year deal, what the hey, indulge me.)

It’s probably no great surmise on my part that without Washington’s lingering financial commitment to Romar, he’d probably be gathering cardboard boxes to stuff office possessions into, so to vacate for the next guy. That’s the inevitable fate of coaches from Power Five conferences who fail for six straight years to get a team into the NCAA tournament.

Big picture, it’s staggering that the matter is even debatable anymore, never mind that Romar has this all-galaxy, all-universe, all-constellation recruiting class coming to Montlake (probably to stay together for, oh, a season and a half, given the roster churn that has besieged the program over those six years). And of course, that debate is framed by the contract that ex-athletic director Scott Woodward hitched to Romar years ago, subject of today’s treatise.

Romar is said to be due some $3 million if the Huskies decide to fire him, result of Woodward having thrown himself mindlessly at the feet of the likable coach back when the Huskies were, you know, relevant.

For the life of me, I don’t know what the hell these people are thinking. But then, I don’t know what they’ve sometimes been thinking at places like Washington State and Oregon State, either.

The arms race, see, is not limited to the building of facilities to keep up the Joneses. It also has a lot to do with salaries, or it must, or we’d more often see evidence of some vague fiscal responsibility instead of athletic directors acting with the forbearance of guys at a weekend bachelor party in Las Vegas
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Somehow, Woodward decided that Washington’s life would be destitute without Romar, so he gave him a 10-year contract in 2010. Yes, there were murmurs about NBA coaching, and there was always the possibility of a college program poaching him, but isn’t six, seven, even eight years a sufficiently solid commitment?

Maybe Woodward was only taking a cue from his regional colleagues. At Washington State in 2009, Jim Sterk concluded that Ken Bone had to have a seven-year deal to replace Tony Bennett, all of it guaranteed. There was even a time when Sterk was paying Bone more than his football coach, and no matter how difficult things were under Paul Wulff, that should never have happened.

Anyway, would the whole thing have fallen through if Sterk had offered a five-year deal, with, say, a liquidated buyout the last year or two, to a coach whose only Division 1 coaching experience was at Portland State of the Big Sky?

(Sterk had left Pullman by the time Bone was let go after the 2014 season. At San Diego State, he dodged my e-mail and voicemail on the subject, and only when buttonholed in person by the Spokane Spokesman-Review at a subsequent NCAA basketball regional did he offer an explanation about the Bone deal. He said he had done the same thing for women’s coach June Daugherty and needed to be equitable. Oh.)

So it was left to Sterk’s successor, Bill Moos, to make a change from Bone to Ernie Kent, who had been out of coaching and was dying to get back into it -- badly enough to take the bait at one of college basketball’s most desperate outposts. Bone had made $850,000 annually. So wouldn’t $1 million or $1.1 million have been a reasonable starting salary, especially at a place where the cost of living is cheaper than the average Pac-12 stop?

No. Kent would get $1.4 million. No low-rent program, those Cougars.

Down at Oregon State a few years ago, athletic director Bob DeCarolis finally pulled the plug on Craig Robinson after six failed seasons of OSU basketball. But not without a sledgehammer buyout of $4 million. What was it that drove DeCarolis to fling himself at President Obama’s brother in law? Was it that crowd of 1,352 home fans for the loss to Radford in the College Basketball Invitational?

Alums have only so long to scratch heads over decisions like these. Some of their effort has to go to guarding their wallets in the face of the inevitable, and plaintive, pleas from their favorite athletic department that they need to step it up financially. The message: Please, save us from ourselves.

Aside from the arms-race component, I’m not sure how to explain these blunders, other than to suggest that (a) athletic directors often don't have any more certainty about hires than the guy who changes their oil; and (b) they hate the process so much that when they think they’ve got the right person, they lock onto him like barnacles.

Exhibit A: Sterk hired Tony Bennett, who, with his dad, authored the most astonishing rebuilding job in the history of Pac-12 basketball. And he hired Wulff, who went 9-41 in four years.

Anyway, we ought to know more on Romar shortly, right after the Huskies complete the season with a 13-game losing streak.

Who knows, a long extension may be coming his way.

#pac12hoops #theslipperstillfits #unitedwezag #uwhuskies #zagsmbb #zagup

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The Romar conundrum: What's the endgame at Washington?

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The new year has brought a deepening of the Lorenzo Romar conundrum, the one in which the Husky men’s basketball coach’s future is clouded by the ongoing wrangle between his coaching and recruiting acumen.

(This blog typically deals with happenings around Gonzaga basketball, but it will occasionally address the nearby programs and college hoops in general.)

On New Year’s evening, the Huskies started Pac-12 play with a home loss to Washington State, punctuated by the usual heroics from freshman guard Markelle Fultz, plus a lot of vacant looks by the other guys on the floor. Three nights later, 15th-ranked Oregon came to town, and the Ducks won by 22, pretty much treating Washington like a cat batting around a dead mouse.

So by now, we know this: For the Husky men, it’s not a question of whether, but how bad. Any real chance of making something of this season is close to having disappeared, and now it’s more an issue of just how far this will sink. After Washington got clocked by Gonzaga four weeks ago, Romar said he was looking forward to seven straight games in Seattle. Ahead of a visit from Oregon State, those first six have produced a 3-3 record and victories over Western Michigan, Cal Poly and Seattle U., significant only in the fact the Huskies didn’t lose to them.

Washington’s record is 7-7 now, and besides the aforementioned three, the wins are against Long Beach State, Western Kentucky, Cal State-Fullerton and Northern Arizona. A reading early this week of the RPI computer rankings of the seven brings us to an average of 271, which means none of the seven is faintly relevant.

It’s gotten so bad that the Wednesday Seattle Times noted that Washington had failed to make the NCAA tournament six straight years. Actually, it’s only five, but by now, who’s counting?

“Lorenzo’s got pocket aces,” crowed a morning talk-show host.

Of course he does. Romar has signed forward Michael Porter Jr., ranked by some the nation’s second-best high school recruit, the centerpiece of a top-five class. And his brother Jontay, a year younger, is committed to Washington.

They’re playing at Nathan Hale High School, where the coach, in his first job, is former Washington great Brandon Roy.

Speaking of first year, a month before Roy was named at Nathan Hale, Romar added Michael Porter Sr. to his staff. In a revealing December piece, Christian Caple of the Tacoma News-Tribune laid out the circumstances of that hire.

Romar and the senior Porter have a long association, dating to when they played together for Athletes in Action a generation ago. And Romar is godfather to Michael Porter Jr.

From there, it grows murkier. Porter Sr.’s coaching background is rooted in AAU circles, then to three years’ each as Missouri women’s basketball operations director and assistant with the Mizzou women, whose roster included two of his daughters. There had been no experience with college men before Washington.

For this, according to Caple’s story, the Huskies decided on a two-year contract for Porter Sr. worth $300,000 a year, plus a $5,000 monthly housing allowance and another $15,000 annually for family travel. Raphael Chillious, Romar’s top assistant, makes $203,016. The other assistant, Will Conroy, makes $144,000.

The Huskies had thought enough of Chillious to bring him back to the UW for a second run after a stint at Villanova. And last April, they announced a promotion of Chillious to the title of associate head coach. That came a month before they made public the hire of Porter Sr., which was a month before the announcement of Roy as coach at Nathan Hale. And in July, Michael Porter Jr. announced he would attend Washington.

In Caple’s story, both Romar and UW athletic director Jennifer Cohen lament some tight finances at the UW as cramping the salary pool for all the assistants, and they cite another unnamed major-conference program as having been desirous of Porter Sr.’s services.

So the solution was to pay Porter Sr. 48 percent more than the top assistant on the staff, ostensibly because of his experience with the Missouri women’s program. Apparently, Geno Auriemma wasn’t available.

The head spins.

We’ll insert here the disclaimer of every treatise on Romar. He has always been a good and honorable man. And there’s nothing known about the saga of the Porters that would violate NCAA rules.

But in the Huskies’ confounding backslide since 2011, Romar has accomplished a jaw-dropping double. Twice, he has had teams that sent two first-round draft choices to the NBA that year and failed to make the NCAA tournament.

Last year, that edition of the Huskies also included the Pac-12’s leading scorer -- a third player, Andrew Andrews -- and still it didn’t happen, a non-feat of majestic magnitude. It came in a Pac-12 Conference that sent seven teams to the NCAA tournament, which means (a) the games were consistently challenging, and (b) there was opportunity after opportunity after opportunity to build a resume.

All of this leaves some Husky fans behaving like a classic drug addict. Just one more fix. Just one more. Just give us one more recruiting class, and everything will be all right. Just as it was going to be all right when Dejounte Murray and Marquese Chriss entered school in 2015. Just as it was going to be all right when Fultz enrolled for this year.

So far, what Fultz has brought is breathtaking ability, surrounded by a bunch of guys who don’t play defense and don’t seem to fit particularly well. The sum is less than the parts, which means Fultz, if he goes No. 1 in the 2017 NBA draft, is Ben Simmons 2.0, minus the dissension.

Here’s a suggestion, then, for Jennifer Cohen: Forget that Husky basketball has signed anybody for next year. Pretend that the recruiting rankings don’t exist.

The Huskies have 17 games left. Evaluate Romar not on the basis of Michael Porter Jr., but on the development of this team -- you know, the one that actually plays and practices at Alaska Airlines Arena, the one with three four-star recruits around Fultz. By March, make a reading on whether they’re getting better, and growing more cohesive, and defending more competently, and playing like they care.

Because what Lorenzo Romar has shown he’s really good at, in the enigmatic recent years of his coaching career, is getting guys to the NBA. Cohen is going to have to decide whether, in the big picture of Husky basketball, that should be the endgame.




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Zags always make a point (a lot of them) against Washington

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After watching Gonzaga put up 98 points against Washington Wednesday night in the rivalry-reinstatement game, I got to thinking: Even with an extended interruption in the series, the Zags have made a habit of scoring on the Huskies.

I didn’t realize how pronounced that trend was
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Going backwards to the 2004-05 game when Washington came to the brand-new Kennel 14th-ranked and fresh from a tournament championship in the Great Alaska Shootout, the Zags have scored 98, 80, 97, 95 and 99 points against Washington. That’s 93.8 points per in those five games.

That ain’t the half of it.

In the last seven games between the two -- dating back through the 2002-03 season -- Gonzaga has shot 50 percent or better in every one.

I find that stupefying.

Here’s the breakdown:

2016: 53.8 percent (Gonzaga wins, 98-71).
2015: 50 percent (Gonzaga, 80-64).
2006: 50.7 percent (Gonzaga, 97-77).
2005: 52.1 percent (Washington, 99-95).
2004: 58.9 percent (Gonzaga, 99-87).
2003: 61.1 percent (Gonzaga, 86-62).
2002: 55.6 percent (Gonzaga in OT, 95-89).

You have to go back to the 2001-02 season to find a Gonzaga team that didn’t shoot 50 percent against Washington. In other words, you have to go back to the last year of the Bob Bender era. The starting guards were Dan Dickau and Blake Stepp for Gonzaga, Curtis Allen and Erroll Knight for Washington.

In that game, Gonzaga shot 41.7 percent. And still won by 20 on the road.

What’s also striking, and surprising, about that stretch is how Washington, whose trademark has been offense-oriented basketball under Lorenzo Romar, hasn’t shot well against Gonzaga. In the last eight games between the two programs (including that last one with the Bender-coached Huskies), Washington has hit the 50-percent mark only once -- and four times has shot .311 or worse, including Wednesday night.

More random, capricious, throwaway observations on the latest proceedings in the Kennel:

-- Captain Obvious here: Washington is a team trying to find its way. That’s clear. But the Huskies did have the advantage of a few days’ extra prep time over Gonzaga, having had a full week between games (TCU to Gonzaga), while the Zags had to focus first on nemesis Arizona last Saturday. Plainly, that edge was worth nothing.

-- While Gonzaga coach Mark Few had to be pleased with the evening’s work, the game will do nothing to increase his appetite for the resumption of the series. Few made it clear to me in “Glory Hounds” that he’s lukewarm about playing Washington, saying, “It’s all about (RPI) top-25 and top-50 wins.” So his team just went out and proved his point for him.

-- Nigel Williams-Goss acquitted himself famously in what had to be a difficult spot -- playing against a coach who had known him since he was a young teenager, his former college coach, one whom he had criticized publicly (by association) upon transferring to GU. It wouldn’t have been a surprise to see him pressing and forcing upon himself a bad night. Instead: 23 points, 9-of-13 shooting, 5 rebounds, 5 assists, 2 turnovers.

-- Markelle Fultz is an effortless scorer, the real deal. But in all honesty, I don’t understand why he would have chosen to come 3,000 miles to a struggling program.

-- Fultz and Zach Collins’ summit meeting: It looked like a perfect block. It’s too bad when an official makes that call, simply on the basis that it looks like it couldn’t have happened without a foul.

-- I don’t ever remember seeing or hearing of a team (Washington) gathering 29 offensive rebounds. It’s other-worldly. But then, you don’t often hear of a team having zero assists at the half, either.
#ZagUP #ZagsMBB #uwgonzaga #uwhuskies

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For this Zags-Huskies matchup, crickets

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A funny thing happened on the way to the renewal of the once-sizzling Washington-Gonzaga basketball rivalry: Nobody cared.

Well, that's not completely true. I'm guessing there will be 6,000 people in an hour at the McCarthey Athletic Center who will care quite a bit about it, as well as the entire fan base of Zag Nation (every college rooting constituency is a Nation these days).

And there are no doubt diehard Husky fans curious to see whether their team can hold up against one of the Zags' most imposing outfits yet.

But when you compare the buildup to this game -- which does, after all, mark the warming of a once-frigid relationship between the two schools -- it pales in comparison to the slings, arrows and verbal barbs that accompanied the Cold War that preceded this.

Recall that when the Huskies curtailed the series in advance of the 2006 game, they did it to further the cause of a "national schedule." That drew a lot of snickers from Gonzaga fans, and a TV camera picked up Zags coach Mark Few saying, "If I'd lost to somebody eight times in nine years, I'd probably want to cancel the series, too." Naturally, that drew major catcalls from Washington partisans.

Virtually forgotten -- or at least unmentioned in contemporary reports -- is the "offer" the Huskies made to Gonzaga in the fall of 2009 of a three-year contract to stage the game at KeyArena. Sure, the 17,000 Key was 5,000 bigger than any other reasonable alternative (the Spokane Arena), but that would have meant Washington was annually traveling four miles for the game, while Gonzaga was doing an overnight 285 miles away.

The Zags laughed at that one, and I can't say I blame them. No doubt that would have been a rousing restart to the series -- virtually guaranteed to sell out -- but Gonzaga would have been at a decided disadvantage.

UW's then-athletic director, Scott Woodward, made that proposal to his GU counterpart, Mike Roth, at about 5 p.m. one day via e-mail. Roth, leaving his office at quitting time, felt he didn't have time even to review the terms before the Huskies leaked it to the media.

Of course, Gonzaga eventually rejected it, Few saying something to the effect that he would have a baby with "Bigfoot" before the Zags would do something like that.

As the years passed, the public passion for the series seemed to wane rather than intensify. Maybe that's what the two sides preferred -- a turndown of the heat around the game.

Or maybe that's what happens when the distance between the programs becomes a gulf. When they tip it off in Spokane tonight, the Zags' RPI computer ranking will be No. 8, the Huskies' No. 180. Surely that's the largest such spread at game time since around the turn of the millennium, when the Zags were getting to three straight Sweet 16s and Washington was nearing the end of the Bob Bender era.

And even if they had been playing every year in the interim, that might still be the largest gap.

So the hubbub around this one is less than fervent. Newspapers have essentially sort of yawned about it. An informal poll on KJR AM Wednesday afternoon found about 75 percent of respondents believing a Washington victory over Alabama in the national football semifinals is a greater likelihood than a UW win at Gonzaga.

That's skepticism, bordering on apathy. We'll see if the Huskies can rouse their faithful to believing tonight.

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UW, Gonzaga and the home fires

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Among the various points of contention when Washington and Gonzaga began a dance aimed at resuming their basketball rivalry was this: Where to resume it?

The Huskies, naturally, wanted it at their place. They argued that the last game (not counting the neutral-site matchup last year in the Bahamas) before the series ended was at Gonzaga (in December of 2006), so it only made sense to restart it at Hec Edmundson Pavilion.

Gonzaga said no dice. You ended the series, they countered, so we hold the cards on where it picks up.

The Zags won out, of course, getting the game in Spokane, and that could be important when east and west meet again Wednesday night.

There is precedent that it matters. In 2004, shortly after Gonzaga opened the McCarthey Athletic Center, the 14th-ranked Huskies were coming off a tournament victory at the Great Alaska Shootout, and when they added another trip, to Spokane, an Adam Morrison-Ronny Turiaf-Derek Raivio team thwarted the Huskies in an extremely high-level game.

A year later, the Zags, after a memorable, third-place trip to the Maui Invitational, played at Hec Ed in early December and lost 99-95 to a Brandon Roy Husky team. (If you saw those two games, you’d have a hard time not arguing the series should have continued.)

Home court was worth a lot in those instances. Whether it matters again Wednesday night might be viewed as debatable, what with Gonzaga now ranked No. 6 by the coaches, and the Huskies scrapping to remain relevant.

But think of it this way: Washington played last Wednesday night, and will have had a week to plot against the Zags. Gonzaga (8-0) spent the latter half of last week dealing with No. 16 Arizona -- albeit injured and depleted Arizona -- so the Huskies have a decided edge in prep time. Washington hosting the game, especially with the Zags having just traveled, would have cut further into that edge.

This could be tantamount to a crusade game for the Huskies (4-3), who have underperformed to date. They could turn the ship around in a mere two hours by getting a win that perhaps nobody else will this season at the MAC.

Two obvious narratives: How Gonzaga deals with the Huskies’ uber-freshman, Markelle Fultz; and how Washington acquits itself against the balance of the Zags.

Fultz will probably see several different Zag defenders, including Jordan Mathews and Silas Melson, and it’s routine for Gonzaga to throw up some zone in such situations, though Fultz (.481) and the Huskies (.424) shoot the three well.

On the other side, there’s this ridiculous stat, which must be unequaled anywhere in Division 1 basketball: Through Gonzaga’s first six games -- three against NCAA-tournament-worthy opposition -- the Zags had seven different players either lead them in scoring or tie for it.

Both teams have functioned well on offense. Washington shoots .492 and Gonzaga .484, the Zags ranking a healthy 12th in Ken Pomeroy’s adjusted offensive ratings. Washington’s biggest concern must be its defensive chops -- or lack thereof; No. 160 by KenPom -- against the offensively adroit Zags. Five GU players average in double figures and a sixth, Mathews, is at 9.1.

Gonzaga has an efficient team assist-turnover ratio of 1.33-to-1, while the Huskies are a shade on the negative side in that category.

And a final item on Washington’s to-do list: In three games against NCAA-tournament-level teams -- Yale and TCU (twice), the Huskies sent the opposition to the foul line 95 times. Gonzaga hurt Washington a year ago inside in the Bahamas matchup, and can (and will) send waves of bigs at the Huskies, who can’t afford to be dominated down deep.

As the series resumes, they’re already conceding a bunch of decibels to the Zags.
#ZagsMBB #uwhuskies

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