SEATTLE — Give him one more night.
That’s all University of Washington men’s basketball coach Lorenzo Romar was requesting Tuesday, when the media bombarded him with questions about the road woes of his team this season.
Should the Huskies come out Thursday night at Cal without any energy, Romar said, and then he’d be happy to “sit down and have a seminar about it.” In fact, he might go one step further than that.
“This year, with our kids out of the house, my wife has been going on the road trips,” said Romar, whose team is 16-1 at home this year and 0-6 away from the UW campus. “We may just leave her home. That might be the whole issue at this point.”
Let it be known that Romar — the coach; no one is certain how Mrs. Romar feels on the subject — is about the only person in Seattle who seems unconcerned about the Huskies’ latest road trip, which begins Thursday in Berkeley, Calif. With a seven-game losing streak away from Hec Edmondson Pavilion, the Huskies have been one of the Pac-10’s most consistent road teams in recent months.
And it’s not the kind of consistency that Romar preaches.
Yet with UW traveling to the Bay Area to face Cal and Stanford later this week, Romar is confident that the Dr. Jekyll Huskies will show up.
“I’m more curious than concerned,” Romar said. “I say curious because I would be shocked if we go on the road, and go on the floor, and don’t have any energy. I would be shocked. So I’m not concerned. I’m just anxious to see if what we’re feeling here is accurate.”
Romar pointed toward recent home wins as proof that the team has turned a corner, saying that convincing victories over Arizona State, Arizona and Seattle University were even more impressive than some home wins earlier this year. He also said that only three of the Huskies’ six road losses have been one-sided.
Senior Quincy Pondexter, who has averaged 25.3 points per game in his last four home days and just 10.3 per game in his last four on the road, surmised that the six road games were not enough to make any blanket statements about the Huskies being roadkill.
“The road issue is getting out of hand a little bit,” Pondexter said. “It’s only been a few games. It hasn’t been an entire season.”
And yet the numbers are somewhat baffling. The Huskies (16-7 overall, 6-5 in the Pac-10) have averaged nearly 20 more points at home (86.3 per game) than they have away from home (66.8). They’ve blown out nine of 16 home opponents by 15 points or more; on the road, UW has been on the wrong end of double-digit blowouts three times in six games.
And, of course, there is the incredible discrepancy in won-loss records.
“When you look at our road games, if we make a couple of free throws at Texas Tech and UCLA, I don’t know if we’re talking about this issue,” said Romar, who has a 61-10 home record and 15-36 mark in road and neutral-site games since the 2006-07 season. “What concerns me is in three games, in two road trips, we didn’t have energy at all.”
And yet Romar isn’t concerned about that happening this Thursday, when the second-place Huskies try to move into a tie for first with a win in Berkeley.
The stats might show that UW is a horrid road team, but Romar thinks this week will tell a different story.
“Let’s wait until Thursday,” he said Tuesday afternoon, when a reporter asked whether the Huskies have a mental block in road games. “If we come out Thursday, and we have no energy, then we can bring in psychologists, psychiatrists — you can talk to the team.
“… I just don’t think that’s going to be an issue. I didn’t say win or lose the game; I just said go out and play right. We’ve played right at home. We just need to do that on the road.”
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