Quincy Pondexter isn’t concerned about five-game road losing streaks, slow starts away from the University of Washington campus or even the mystique that comes with playing at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion.
The Huskies’ lone senior just wants to rub shoulders with some famous people.
“To play there, and to see the celebrities, to see Urkel at courtside, it’s like man,” Pondexter said this week as the Huskies prepared to travel to Los Angeles for today’s Pac-10 men’s basketball game at UCLA and Saturday’s contest at USC.
It’s no secret that Los Angeles is crawling with celebrities. But Urkel?
“Yeah, Jaleel White,” a giddy Pondexter said of the actor who played Steve Urkel in a 1990s TV show called “Family Matters” before enrolling at UCLA. ”He’s the biggest one. It seems like he sits in the same exact position every time. Sometimes during a timeout or when I’m on the bench, I’ll glance over like, ‘Man, that’s Urkel over there.’”
While Pondexter has been a bit star-struck in his first three trips to the UCLA campus, his UW team could best be described by a different adjective on its most recent road trip.
Awestruck.
The Huskies were slow out of the gates — twice — while losing by 17 points — twice — in a two-game road swing in Arizona two weeks ago. Defeats at Arizona State and Arizona left UW with an 0-4 record away from Hec Edmundson Pavilion this season. The losing streak extends to five games if you include the NCAA tournament loss to Purdue in Portland last March.
The road has been a tough one to hoe for the Huskies, who have an 11-1 record at home this season.
“The last two road games, we didn’t play as hard as we could,” sophomore Isaiah Thomas said when asked about the two lopsided losses in Arizona. “We didn’t bring the energy that we did these last two home games. If we bring that, the sky’s the limit, man.”
There are several theories about why UW (12-5 overall, 3-3 in the Pac-10) has such a disparate record on the road as compared to at home.
The Huskies played nine of 11 non-conference games at Hec Ed, which might not have prepared them well enough for road games.
UW also feeds off the energy at Hec Ed, while road games offer no such built-in momentum.
Then there is the theory put forth by Cal coach Mike Montgomery this week.
“They’re so aggressive to begin with (that) a lot of what they do, they’re able to — for lack of a better term — get away with at home,” said Montgomery, whose Golden Bears lost 84-69 at Hec Ed on Saturday. “It allows them to be aggressive.”
UW coach Lorenzo Romar didn’t necessarily disagree with that theory.
“When we’re playing the right way, we try to pressure and we try to be physical,” he said. “Sometimes when the officials call a lot of early fouls, mentally, that kind of makes us do a little self-analysis. It becomes paralysis-by-analysis at times. That could be the case.”
What is indisputable is that the Huskies did not have the same energy at the start of the Arizona games as they did in last week’s home sweep of Stanford and Cal. The question is how to get that energy in the UW players at the start of tonight’s game at UCLA.
“What we just continue to try to do is build our team in such a way — whether it’s on Mars, or whether it’s in the basement, or whether in front of 20,000 — whatever the situation is, this is just how we go about our business,” Romar said. “I don’t know if we’re there yet.
“We’re preparing, and hopefully we feel like we’ve turned the corner to where, whether we’re on the road or whether we’re at home, it doesn’t matter; we play one way. But we haven’t done that yet. So it remains to be seen.”
Pondexter, who averages 21.2 points per game at home this season compared to 17.5 in road games, is looking forward to more than just another Urkel sighting tonight. He’s hoping to see a different road team than the one in Arizona two weeks ago.
“For the most part, people who saw us on TV, they realized that wasn’t the same team,” he said. “But that wasn’t because people weren’t (in Arizona) for us. It’s because we weren’t playing the right way. We weren’t putting up the energy and effort that we needed to. We have to do a better job of that.”
And maybe then Pondexter will get a victory handshake from his favorite celebrity.
“Sometimes I was like: ‘Man, if we win this game, I want to go over and get his autograph …,’” he said. “But we haven’t come out on (the winning) end yet. Hopefully, this time I’ll get his autograph.”
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