SEATTLE — Through one of the most tumultuous weeks in recent memory, the University of Washington men’s basketball team can take solace in the fact that — on the court — nothing has changed.
The Huskies still lead the Pac-10 Conference and could really solidify their spot in the driver’s seat with a couple of wins in the Bay Area this week.
But what was beginning to look like an expressway through the conference and into the NCAA tournament may well be a rocky road for UW. A season-ending injury to point guard Abdul Gaddy and the pending legal situation of an unnamed player could prove to be the Huskies’ toughest tests of the conference season.
“Adversity,” head coach Lorenzo Romar said Tuesday, “it’s always interesting how people handle it.”
The 17th-ranked Huskies (12-3 overall, 4-0 in the Pac-10) get back on the court tonight, when they’ll face a scrappy Stanford team in a venue where UW has annually struggled. Washington won its last two games in Palo Alto but lost 14 in a row leading into the 2008-09 season.
“For us, Maples Pavilion has been a little bit like Boston Garden was for the old (Los Angeles) Lakers, when they said leprechauns were knocking balls off the rims and stuff like that,” Romar said. “We’ve had some strange things happen to us down at Stanford and have come up short many times.”
This year’s Cardinal (9-5, 2-1) were supposed to be a non-factor in the Pac-10 race — do-it-all leading scorer Landry Fields graduated from last year’s eighth-place team — but have been more competitive than expected. Stanford won its first two conference games by a combined 28 points before falling at Arizona on Sunday.
Juniors Jeremy Green (15.9 points per game) and Josh Owens (12.0 ppg) have helped fill the Fields void, while freshman Aaron Bright of Bellevue High School has stepped in to lead the offense at point guard.
Stanford coach Johnny Dawkins appears to have the Cardinal on the right track, but he also knows that he’ll have his work cut out for him tonight.
“Washington is a terrific team, a terrific program,” he said. “We’re going to have to play our best basketball to compete with them.”
It remains to be seen whether this week’s distractions — one of the UW players was accused of sexual assault over the weekend, although no charges had been filed as of Wednesday — will allow the Huskies to play their best basketball. After double-digit home wins over Oregon and Oregon State, UW returns to the road for the first of five away dates in a seven-game span.
Since the beginning of the 2006-07 season, the Huskies are 16-26 in road games.
If UW can scrape out a road win tonight, and another at California on Sunday, the Huskies could really put themselves in a good position one-third of the way into the conference season. They’re currently the lone Pac-10 team with a national ranking and its lone unbeaten in conference games. Before Gaddy’s injury and this week’s news, the Huskies appeared to be on cruise control in a conference filled with non-ranked teams.
But things are in a bit of flux now, starting in the backcourt. Super-sub Venoy Overton has started the last two games in place of Gaddy, while leading scorer Isaiah Thomas has been asked to play more point guard as well.
“We’ve had the luxury of having three point guards,” Romar said. “Abdul is down now, but that just makes us have normal depth at the position. So there aren’t a lot of adjustments that need to be made in terms of minutes.”
Reserve wing player Scott Suggs played some point guard at the end of the Oregon State game and could fill in there in a pinch. Fellow reserves Terrence Ross and C.J. Wilcox have provided punch of the bench at times this season as well.
UW still has plenty of depth — including Gaddy, 10 different Huskies have scored in double-digits at least once this season — and ranks among the nation’s leaders in points per game.
That was the old UW team, the one without the distractions. The new Huskies are still coming together, and there’s a chance they might soon get torn apart.
For now, with the criminal investigation still pending, UW will have a lot of the same faces.
Tonight, they’ll show whether they can keep putting up the same results.
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