Since about the time that Pac-10 underclassmen like James Harden, Jordan Hill, DeMar DeRozan and Jrue Holiday made early jumps to the NBA, fans of men’s college basketball have known that tonight’s game between California and Washington would be important.
Just not this important.
The winner of today’s game could be in the driver’s seat for a Pac-10 title and a possible berth in the NCAA tournament. For the loser, barring a conference tournament win and its guaranteed bid, the only postseason hope is likely to be a three-letter tourney for also-rans.
The NIT and the CBI are so far off UW coach Lorenzo Romar’s radar that he wasn’t even willing to entertain a question about whether the Huskies would accept a bid to a lesser tournament.
“We’re trying to get to the NCAA tournament,” he said during his Tuesday press conference.
While Cal and Washington were considered the preseason favorites to be in position to win the Pac-10, tonight’s game takes on added importance because of how far the conference has fallen. As Cal’s Mike Montgomery pointed out this week, the game has lost so much luster that it’s no longer considered must-see TV.
“It got moved (from ESPN) to ESPN2 because it’s not quite the matchup they expected when the season began,” Montgomery said. “It’s good they don’t have an ESPN4.”
That the Huskies (16-7 overall, 6-5 in the Pac-10, and ranked 53rd in the RPI) are even in position to win a conference title is a bit of a miracle when considering how far this team had fallen when Pac-10 play began. UW lost three of its first four games before catching Stanford and Cal at home in mid-January. A convincing, 84-69 win over the red-hot Bears on Jan. 16 put the Huskies back on the map.
“I figured Washington would always be there,” Montgomery said. “They’re a very talented group, and they’ve got a lot of people back from last year, certainly.”
Montgomery witnessed that first-hand in the Jan. 16 game that saw the Huskies jump out to a big lead and maintain an advantage of at least 20 points for the final 311/2 minutes.
Tonight, Cal (15-8, 7-4, 25th in the RPI) gets its shot at revenge.
“They’ll be ready to play,” Romar said. “That game was a while ago. That game was last month; this is a new day. They’re ready to go.
“It’s no different than we lost by 17 at Arizona and Arizona State. And when they came here (last week), we were ready to go. That’s how they’ll be.”
The biggest key to Cal’s success today is the play of point guard Jerome Randle. The senior is the Pac-10’s fourth-leading scorer, yet he had just five points when the Bears lost at UW on Jan. 16.
Asked whether he expects a different performance out of Randle this time, Montgomery said: “It’s going to have to be different. They did a great job defending him.”
A few days after that game, Montgomery said that the Huskies are able to play more aggressively at home, telling reporters on a conference call: “A lot of what they do, they’re able to — for lack of a better term — get away with at home.”
Montgomery backed off that comment a bit this week, saying: “The crowd gives them a lot of energy up there. They play very hard, and they handled us up there. We obviously can’t let that happen again.”
This time, the Bears have the advantage of playing at home. Cal is 11-3 in home games this season, while the Huskies have yet to win a single game away from Hec Edmondson Pavilion.
“You’ve got to win on your homecourt if you want to compete for the top spots,” Montgomery said, “and that’s probably the way it should be.”
Romar said this week that he expects the Huskies to be more energetic than they’ve been in some of their road losses this season.
But when it comes to the importance of tonight’s game, the UW coach wasn’t willing to put it ahead of any of the others.
“There’s not one game,” he said. “You pick the team with the worst record in our league, or the lowest RPI, and I can tell you why that game’s important — because if you lose that game, you drop big-time, more than if you lose to a big-time opponent like Cal.
“So this game has its significance, and the next one has its significance. They all do.”
If the Huskies are serious about defending their regular-season Pac-10 title, tonight’s game has huge implications.
The importance can’t be understated, even if Romar insists on doing so.
“We went through this last year, when we had seven games to go to win the Pac-10 championship,” he said this week. “Each game, pretty much (reporters) asked that same question: ‘Do you feel like this is the biggest game of the year?’ And, yeah, it is. Down the stretch, all of them are going to be huge.
“Next week, guarantee you, the games are going to be just as big as this one now.”
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