By John Sleeper
Herald Writer
SEATTLE – University of Washington men’s basketball coach Bob Bender has seen a lot of Casey Jacobsen this week on film.
“Too much,” Bender said, in talking about the Stanford guard, the league’s top scorer at 22 points a game.
Bender and the Huskies might be taking on Jacobsen at exactly the wrong time. The past two Thursdays, Jacobsen has exceeded the 40-point mark and is giving the 12th-ranked Cardinal (8-4 Pacific-10 Conference, 15-6 overall) a late-season boost coming into the league tournament next month.
“When he has the ball in his hands, there’s a 99-percent chance that he’s going to score it,” Bender said. “But it’s what he does to lead up to that point that I really respect. No one is efficient in reading the defense, coming off screens, punishing somebody when they cheat, using the simple things such as a shot fake and finish in traffic.. He’s the complete package.”
Jacobsen has combined with 6-foot-11 junior center Curtis Borchardt, who attended Redmond’s Eastlake High School, to give Stanford a deadly inside-outside game. For Borchardt, this has been his first relatively injury-free season after wrestling two years with two stress fractures in his left foot. Borchardt has collected four consecutive double-doubles, averaging 19.8 points and 14.8 rebounds in that time.
So effective has Borchardt been that he was quoted as saying recently that he may look at leaving Stanford early for the NBA Draft, a notion that Cardinal coach Mike Montgomery said he would actively discourage.
“Everybody considers going into the NBA,” Montgomery said. “The more we ask about it, the more they have to respond to the question. I don’t think kids would even think about it if nobody asked them about it. But because everybody does when a guy scores 10 points, most of the kids are asked whether they’re going to go this year or next year. I’d discourage it. Curtis is going to be 250, 255 pounds next year and I think will be the top center in the country.”
Bender, himself, faces the same potential problem in forward Doug Wrenn, who at 20.4 points a game is the second-leading scorer in the conference.
Wrenn has come on strong in the Huskies last 10 games, averaging 26.2 points in that span. He has produced 30-plus point performances in four of the last five games, including the last three, the third in UW history ever to do that.
“We have not had any discussions this year (about the NBA),” Bender said. “I think that would be a disservice to what he’s trying to do and the example he’s trying to set. It’s not something that can have any good effect on what we’re still trying to accomplish. But when the time comes, we will talk very honestly and have a plan.”
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