SEATTLE — Maybe now the Huskies will spend more time practicing their offense.
Or, perhaps more accurately, maybe now the Huskies need to start spending more time on their offense.
In the ninth game of a non-conference schedule that Lorenzo Romar has dedicated to defensive improvement, Washington played one of its best games on defense. The offense, however, struggled to find a rhythm, and the result was a closer-than-it-probably-should-have-been 67-63 victory over the University of Portland at Hec Edmundson Pavilion Saturday.
“Maybe temporarily,” Romar said when asked if the focus on defense has slowed his team’s offense. “When you first start lifting and you want to get stronger, initially you lose a little bit of your legs — you’re not as quick and you don’t jump as high. But it comes back and you’re a lot better jumper and a little quicker after you’ve lifted. With the emphasis on defense we have not spent a whole lot of time [on offense]. I think this week we’ve spent 5-6 hours on defense and maybe one and a half on offense. Sometimes that shows. But the offense is something that we feel one or two days of practice can fix. Defense takes a little longer.”
In part because of the offensive struggles — Washington shot 33.3 percent in the first half, and 67 points represents the team’s second-lowest total of the season — the Huskies trailed for much of the afternoon and were never able to build a comfortable lead against the Pilots.
The result was very much in doubt until the final seconds. With his team trailing by two, Portland point guard Taishi Ito missed a three pointer with 44 seconds left. Rather than foul the Huskies — who again struggled at the free throw line, making just 55.6 percent of their attempts — the Pilots played for the stop with about an eight-second differential between the shot and game clocks, and Ryan Appleby made them pay. Appleby sank a short jump shot as the shot clock expired with seven seconds left on the game clock to seal the win.
“I’d prefer to get the stop and the win, but in hindsight, we should have fouled,” said Portland coach Eric Reveno. “In hindsight, a foul would have been a good thing to do. I just felt at the time that we could rely on our defense to get a stop. You foul the wrong guy with 20 seconds and they make two free throws, then all of sudden you’re trying to score, and it’s not like we were scoring at will.”
The Pilots were indeed struggling to score, especially in the second half when they shot just 32.1 percent. Portland’s 63 points were the fewestby a Washington opponent since the Huskies’ season-opening win over New Jersey Tech. The Huskies, on the other hand, improved on offense in the second half, scoring 41 points while making 14 of 19 field goal attempts (73.7 percent). That followed a 26-point first half.
“I wouldn’t say it alarmed me,” Romar said of the offensive struggles. “There’s going to be another game where that happens this year, we just can’t get anything going. The test of your team is when you can’t get anything going offensively, and you’re still able to do a decent job defending. And I thought in the second half, that’s what we did. I thought we finished it the right way.”
The Huskies trailed by as many as seven points in the first half, and were behind 30-26 at halftime. They took a little bit longer than normal coming out of the locker room for the start of the second half.
“It was probably a little bit longer, but we played such a bad first half, we had a lot of stuff to go over,” said Appleby.
Whatever Washington went over during the intermission seemed to work for Appleby, who scored 18 points for the second straight game since coming back from a thumb injury that kept him out of Washington’s first seven games.
After scoring just four points in the first half and missing all three of his 3-point attempts, Appleby came out hot in the second half, sinking his first three shots — all 3-pointers — in the first two minutes of the half.
“Two consecutive games now, we’ve seen the value of Ryan Appleby to this team,” said Romar.
Appleby provided the offense on a night when Jon Brockman was held well below his average with 11 points and just five rebounds before fouling out late in the game. Tim Morris added 10 points and eight rebounds.
Nik Raivio led Portland with a game-high 23 points and Ito added 13. Freshman guard Jared Stohl, a Marysville-Pilchuck graduate, added eight points in 10 minutes, making all three of his field-goal attempts, including two 3-pointers.
“It was fun getting play in front of the family and a local crowd,” he said. “It was real fun. At first I was a little nervous, but as soon as you get out there and touch the ball a couple of times, you get used to it.”
Romar again tinkered with his lineup and rotation while trying to improve his team’s defense. Saturday’s lineup consisted of Brockman, Morris, Appleby, Joel Smith and Artem Wallace. Joe Wolfinger, who started last week against Pittsburgh, did not play. Romar was happy with some of what he saw Saturday, even if the score wasn’t what most people expected.
“People may look at it as we played an opponent that we’re probably more talented than, and we should have beat them by 20 or 30,” he said. “We told our guys today at shoot around, we’re going to look at our defensive errors and our level of defensive intensity. If those pan out, nothing else matters. We’ve got to focus on that. Not the winning and losing. Are we making a commitment defensively with our team. And if we’re doing that eventually the ship will be righted. And again, I thought we made progress in spite of the score.”
Contact Herald Writer John Boyle at jboyle@heraldnet.com. For more on University of Washington sports, check out the Huskies blog at heraldnet.com/huskiesblog
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