Win over Huskies would suit Cougars just fine

PULLMAN – The Washington State men’s basketball team has played at many speeds this season, but on Wednesday they’re going to play at Ernie Kent’s favorite tempo.

The Cougars are going to be fast.

WSU (9-20, 1-16 Pac-12) won’t have any other choice against the Washington Huskies (16-13, 8-9), who have he country’s second-fastest possessions, according to KenPom.com.

Despite Kent’s desire to play fast, the Cougars have had too much variance in their personnel to maintain a single pace. There have been 14 different WSU starting lineups in 29 games, and Ike Iroegbu is the only player to start every game.

Recent opponents have also utilized full-court presses against the Cougars, limiting their ability to get down the court quickly.

“Oregon, Oregon State both pressed us. We broke their press versus attacking their press,” said Kent. “It wasn’t so much them slowing us down as we didn’t attack the press, and slowed ourselves down, for whatever reason. Personnel, fatigue, we didn’t want to turn the ball over and played more of a tempo game.”

The Cougars also slowed down in the latter half of conference play due to Charles Callison’s concussion, which kept the starting point guard out for four games. Callison’s absence led to Ny Redding’s insertion as the offense’s conductor.

That switch led to more methodical players, such as Que Johnson, scoring more points, while a fastbreak scorer like Iroegbu faded from his early-season scoring prominence.

But Callison is back in the starting lineup and should be willing to run with the Huskies, against whom he had 14 points and five assists while leading the team with 40 minutes on the court during WSU’s overtime loss in Pullman.

While the Huskies aren’t on a 15-game slide like the Cougars, they too have seen diminished success during the final month of Pac-12 play. While UW once seemed like a strong candidate for an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament, the Huskies have lost six of their last seven games and will need to have a very good showing in the conference tournament to have a shot at March Madness.

Of course, they also have to beat WSU on Wednesday, which will also serve as the final home game for senior guard Andrew Andrews, who leads the Pac-12 in scoring with 20.3 points per game.

“We do have some things in our favor in terms of motivation and emotion, said UW coach Lorenzo Romar. “But on the other hand, you just always want to guard against someone taking a team (lightly) based on their record. And there’s no way – we have to remember that team took us to overtime at their place last time. And they beat us here last year. So there is no way in the world we should come out not ready to go.”

For weeks the Cougars have pointed at the Pac-12 tournament as their best chance to salvage some meaning from what has been a slog of a season. But a win in Seattle would serve as a close second in terms of validating a program whose players and coach insist improvement was made even as the weeks piled up without wins.

“The thing that’s impressed me the most is that the young people, to not be rewarded after how hard they’ve worked and how hard they’ve pushed in practice,” Kent said. “When they’ve not been rewarded with the victories, they continue to come back and work for us.”