SEATTLE — Even before his highly-regarded UCLA men’s basketball team got throttled by the University of Washington last Friday, Bruins head coach Ben Howland was on board the Huskies’ bandwagon.
Howland spent part of last Thursday questioning a national reporter about how UW
could possibly have been left out of the Top 25 — and that was a day before he got an up close look at the Huskies in a 74-63 loss at Pauley Pavilion.
And now? Howland might as well be driving that bus.
“I think they can beat any team in the country, on a given day,” the UCLA coach said of the Huskies during Tuesday’s Pac-10 conference call.
And he’s not the only one who’s thinking that.
“To me,” said USC coach Kevin O’Neill, whose Trojans lost to UW in overtime one week ago, “they’re doing all the things you need to be successful and to play for a championship at the end of the year.”
Two games into Pac-10 play, the Huskies (10-3 overall, 2-0 in the conference) have certainly asserted themselves as the team to beat — not only in the league but beyond. UW returned to the national top-25 rankings after a three-week layoff, at No. 23, and is being projected as a No. 5 NCAA tournament seed in ESPN’s weekly breakdown known as Bracketology.
It’s enough to make for some proud Huskies these days.
“Success is one of the hardest things to handle,” UW coach Lorenzo Romar said. “But I think the guys are starting to learn (that) you’re as good as your last game.
“It’s fascinating in sports to me: win a couple, and it seems like you’ve never lost; you lose one, and it seems like you’ve never won. I think our guys are starting to understand that.”
Still, it’s got to be hard for the Huskies not to walk with a little more swagger after the first L.A.-week sweep since 2006 and only the third in program history.
“That was a big weekend,” reserve guard Scott Suggs said. “But we’ve got to come back this week and take care of business (against Oregon and Oregon State) and not be so focused on what happened last week.”
Guard Isaiah Thomas, who had 27 points and 12 assists in the past two wins, said the sweep of USC and UCLA is already in the rearview mirror.
“We’re past it now,” he said. “It was cool while it happened; it was, ‘Hooray, we won two games.’ But it was just the first two games of the conference. There’s a long ways to go, and we’ve got better things to do than just those two games.”
What is nice to see, the Huskies admit, is that they’re back in the national rankings. After losing to current ranked teams Kentucky (No. 10), Michigan State (No. 18) and Texas A&M (No. 16) to drop out of the rankings for three weeks, UW has won four consecutive games by an average of 18.8 points per victory.
“We woke some people up,” Thomas said, “and that’s good for this program and this team.”
Pac-10 coaches have been among those who have taken notice.
“I think they might be an even better shooting team than they were last year,” said Oregon State coach Craig Robinson, whose Beavers will be at Hec Edmundson Pavilion to face the Huskies on Saturday afternoon. “It’s tough losing a guy like (graduated senior Quincy) Pondexter to the NBA, but it seems like they’ve (bounced back) so far.”
The Huskies are certainly in a better position than they were this time last year, when a home loss to Oregon started a three-game losing streak that left UW scrambling for postseason hope the rest of the regular season. The Ducks will be back at Hec Ed on Thursday night, and the Huskies know they can’t take them for granted.
But with two conference wins already under their collective belts, this year’s Huskies have a little breathing room.
“It will put less pressure on us later in the season,” senior Justin Holiday said. “But we’ve only won two games; we haven’t done anything else yet.”
Apparently, the return of expectations has not gone to UW’s head.
“We’ve had slow starts, when (people say) we should shut down the program, and then at the end (they say that) we’re going to the Final Four,” Romar said. “You can’t get caught up in that. We have to be caught up in: did we get better today?”
Thomas has an even bigger motivation. He doesn’t care what the most recent poll says; his Huskies still feel slighted.
“You just always play with a chip on your shoulder and try to get better and prove people wrong,” he said.
The Huskies have done that after two Pac-10 games or, depending on how one looks at it, they might just be finally living up to expectations.
“We’re climbing our way back up,” freshman Terrence Ross said. “We’re just using it as motivation to work harder.”
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