Pac-12 honors a trio of Husky basketball players

Published 1:30 am Monday, March 5, 2018

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – A trio of University of Washington men’s basketball players earned All-Pac-12 honors Monday as junior Noah Dickerson was named to the All-Pac-12 first team, junior Matisse Thybulle was named to the all-defensive team and freshman Jaylen Nowell was named to the all-freshman squad.

Dickerson earned his first ever Pac-12 honors after averaging 15.4 points per game, up from 12.5 points as a sophomore. He has recorded nine of his 15 career double-doubles this season, with six of those nine coming in Pac-12 play. He is the first UW forward to earn first-team All-Pac-12 honors since Matthew Bryan-Amaning in 2011.

Nowell leads the Huskies in scoring at 16.0 points per game and has led the team in scoring 13 times this season. The Seattle native is 82 points shy of the UW freshman scoring record.

Thybulle has been a force on the defensive end this season in head coach Mike Hopkins’ 2-3 zone as he has set the UW career record in steals with 196 and also moved into the UW career top 10 in blocks with 98. He is the only UW player in program history to be in the top 10 in both categories. He is also sixth in Pac-12 history in single-season steals with his 92 this year, which is 18 off the Pac-12 single season record and is the UW single-season mark. Thybulle is just the fourth player in UW history to earn all-defensive honors, joining Aziz N’Diaye (2011), Justin Holiday (2010) and Venoy Overton (2010).

And it’s possible Thybulle’s awards haul could just be starting.

The Pac-12 will announce individual honors at 5 p.m. PST on the Pac-12 Network. The show will reveal who won conference’s Player of the Year, Coach of the Year, Freshman of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year.

Thybulle is a strong candidate for the Defensive Player of the Year award, and first-year UW coach Mike Hopkins is a favorite to win John R. Wooden Coach of the Year award.

Should Thybulle win the award, it would be the first time in school history a UW player has captured the honor.

Hopkins came to UW after spending 20 years as an assistant at Syracuse, where he was a two-year captain for the Orange.

He transformed the Huskies from a 9-22 team that won just two Pac-12 games last season into a 20-win team that’s currently on the bubble for the NCAA Tournament.

If Hopkins wins, it’ll be the seventh time UW has won the award. Also, he’ll be the first coach to win the award in his maiden season since Tony Bennett won in the 2006-07 campaign with Washington State.

The seventh-seeded Huskies open the 2018 Pac-12 Tournament Wednesday against 10th-seeded Oregon State.

For the complete All-Pac-12 teams, click here.