One more cupcake for Dawgs

Published 11:19 pm Monday, November 15, 2010

SEATTLE — The University of Washington men’s basketball team gobbled up the chocolate with vanilla frosting. Now the Huskies have a tray full of sparkle-covered, strawberry-flavored desserts on the table.

The cupcake part of UW’s schedule continues tonight when Eastern Washington visits for what has the potential to be a second consecutive blowout victory for the 17th-ranked Huskies. Things have the potential to get more difficult when UW heads off to Hawaii for next week’s Maui Invitational, but the Huskies swear they’re not looking that far ahead.

“Me personally, it’s not hard for me to get up for any game,” senior Justin Holiday said. “As long as I’m playing, I’m ready to go. And I think my teammates feel the same way.”

Last season, a soft preseason schedule nearly cost UW a trip to the NCAA tournament. The widespread belief was that the Huskies would not have received an NCAA tournament bid had it not been for their victory in the title game of the Pac-10 tournament.

This year’s schedule looks remarkably similar — Texas Tech, Portland, San Francisco and Texas A&M are back, although none of them are as well-regarded — while the Maui Invitational has the potential for some RPI-boosting competition.

Before that happens, the Huskies (1-0) welcome one more small-conference opponent to Hec Ed tonight.

“Whether you feel you’re an overwhelming favorite or you’re an overwhelming underdog, you’ve got to develop habits,” UW coach Lorenzo Romar said Monday. “The good teams, the veteran teams, they just play. They get down 20, they don’t get rattled. They get up 20, they don’t get content and let down.”

If there is any question about UW’s ability to get up for an inferior opponent, the Huskies answered it with a resounding 54-point win over McNeese State on Saturday. Washington jumped out to a 44-9 lead and never really let off the gas.

“The beauty about playing 40 minutes is that it applies to not only McNeese State but it applies to the Pac-10 Conference tournament championship game,” Romar said. “It’s a standard way of playing. You try to become like a machine.”

That machine hopes to keep rolling through tonight’s opponent.

Rather than schedule a national contender from, say, Spokane, the Huskies preferred to bring Cheney’s finest to town for a cross-state tilt. EWU (0-1) has just four returning lettermen from last year’s 9-21 team, and the best of them — point guard Glenn Dean — is out with a stress fracture in his foot. The Eagles already have lost exhibition games to Seattle Pacific and Montana State-Billings, and the Huskies will be the most talented team the Eagles face all season.

While UW’s schedule gets more difficult, it might never reach the level required for a big-time RPI ranking. The Huskies don’t have a single ranked team on their schedule as of yet. The most likely candidate comes in a potential second-round Maui matchup with 12th-ranked Kentucky. But the Wildcats recently lost one of their top recruits to NCAA suspension, after UK’s starting five from last year had already moved on to the NBA, so even that ranking is teetering.

What is likely to make this year’s schedule a bit more competitive is the strong possibility that the Pac-10 will be better. Teams such as Arizona, UCLA and/or Arizona State could conceivably crack the top-25 by the turn of the calendar year.

But if that doesn’t happen, the Huskies’ preseason success could be as important as ever when it comes to earning a high seed at the NCAA tournament.

“Based on last year’s judgment of the (conference), they are important,” Romar said of the non-conference games.

Conventional wisdom would say that tonight’s opponent could be a trap because the Huskies may well be looking past EWU and toward the beaches of Maui. But Romar said his team won’t look at the Eagles that way.

“I don’t think it’s a dangerous one,” Romar said of tonight’s game. “This (UW team) is a more mature group.”

Notes

When asked about the NCAA’s recent decision to permanently suspend Kentucky freshman and one-time UW recruit Enes Kanter, Romar said: “Feel bad for him. He doesn’t have a chance to play.” Kanter made a verbal commitment to the Huskies last winter, and Romar said Monday that he was aware of a possible NCAA suspension — although he believed it would be a handful of games. Part of Kanter’s commitment to UW, Romar said, involved the recruit passing a test that he did not pass — thus, the decision to commit to another school. Kanter, a 6-foot-10 native of Turkey and probably a lottery pick in next summer’s NBA draft, was ruled ineligible because of professional games he played in Europe. … Romar said he did not plan to talk to 7-footer Aziz N’Diaye about his free-throw shooting, despite a 3-for-15 performance against McNeese State on Saturday. “You can do so much to where someone loses total confidence and they’re thinking about it too much,” he said.