True no great teams in PAC 10 – not sure if any good teams – medicority at best – tourney wide open.

We can get great scoring from a lot of folks on offense, but a team that really puts in a days work and studies film on us can tell who the scorers are for Washington.

go to guy: QPon
2nd option: IT

Other then that it’s easy to figure out who to defend. Overton will slash to the basket and is really special in transition, but opponents will usually leave him open on the perimeter. Gaddy will penetrate but is a hesitant shooter. Turner and Suggs are great perimeter shooters, but not so much in transition or in the lane. MBA is good at point blank range if he isn’t be guarded. Breshears dito. Gant is not a scoring threat period. Holiday is good for garbage buckets, but comes up empty on everything that is a jumper.

There’s a lot of talent, but who can you depend on other then QPon having a 16+ point night? IT is not having the same success he had as a freshman, because most opponents have figured out his routine moves to the hole. When you have a bunch of players that do one individual thing great, most often you become a team that is easily defended. We feed off the home crowd as good as anybody and that most always leads to a victory at home. But when you don’t have the home crowd in your corner we’ve become a very predictable team. Play tough defense on QPon and IT. Don’t offer the lane to Overton. Give plenty of room for Gant and Holiday to shoot outside, and bang MBA and Breshears into tough point blank shots. That’s it! And that is what you are seeing Pac 10 opponents do. How can we compensate?

In our half court sets, we have to get great spacing and we aren’t doing that. Great spacing opens up lanes to penetrate, it creates more space for the opposing defense to defend. With crisp passing with great spacing, eventually we’ll find a good shot that even Gant and Holiday can make consistently. It’s all about proper spacing in the half court and we aren’t getting it.

Washington is a very predictable team in terms of personnel.

I haven’t seen the talent you are talking about crazi – Pondexter yes – the rest of the team does not look any better than the bulk of the other PAC 10 teams very average. Our coaching average at best. We are a sub 500 team if we didn’t have all those home games.

the remaining road games starting tonight with Furd. They will beat UCLA at home, USC is just not a good matchup physically for us, but USC has a tendency to take games off. The Huskies will need for them to do that. So that would be 5-0 plus 1 toss up (USC) in the rest of regular season. I thnk they will need to win 2 games in Pac 10 tourney, ie make finals to get an NCAA bid. They need to finish 2nd or 3rd in league season to get in a more advantageous bracket seeding for Pac 10 tourney.

Another disappointment on a dismal season. This team has no toughness. It is pretty clear they need to start Venoy and bring Gaddy off the bench. They need to get Gant in some sort of offensive rythm and get him back on the court and go back to playing defense and getting transistion buckets or passing the ball when they don’t.