UW Basketball’s Husky Classic Cancelled

The 2020 season is not off to a good start for the Washington Huskies Men’s Basketball team. UW announced today that the Husky Classic Multi-Team Event that was set to open the team’s season has been cancelled due to difficulties with COVID-19 for all the other teams involved.

Last week it came out that Portland and Portland State had not yet received permission from Oregon governor Kate Brown to resume practice after state guidelines changed due to their less stringent testing than the Pac-12 schools. Portland State was intended to be Washington’s first opponent on Wednesday night. Then it came out yesterday morning that San Diego, Washington’s Black Friday opponent, had a positive test within the program and was shutting things down. Finally, this morning it came out that Cal State Fullerton which was a week from today’s scheduled foe had also shut down their program after positive tests.

The decision to cancel the entire event given that Washington was seemingly going to be the only available team seemed inevitable and happened quickly after CSF’s positive test result.

Things though have been even worse than that. With these first 3 games cancelled the next scheduled game appears to be a game at Utah on December 3rd. However, Utah has also put things on pause after multiple positive tests within their team. Utah’s football program is finally making their season debut today after an outbreak within the team led to their first 2 games getting cancelled. There will be almost exactly 14 days from the first news of Utah’s positive test until that scheduled game on 12/3 so there is a small amount of hope that the Utes will have things under control by that point.

If the Utah game is also cancelled then it means the Huskies would open the season on December 9th against Seattle U unless they can find replacement games in the interim. The Washington football team has also had issues with their scheduled opponents as the season opener against Cal was cancelled and things currently look grim for the chances of the Apple Cup happening as scheduled after the Cougars couldn’t get 53 health players for today’s game against Stanford.

We’ll have more updates as they come in but for now it looks like it may be a while before we see the new look Dawgs out on the court.

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