Everything Aggie fans need to know about Washington basketball
In just a matter of days, Utah State will travel to Columbus, Ohio and there face the Huskies of Washington. If you don’t know much about the team that won the Pac-12 regular season title, don’t worry! Neither did most of the USU basketball team when they found out they’d be playing UW.
At this point, however, the Aggie players and staff are steeped in research and film so that the task of beating the Huskies won’t prove incredibly difficult. That means you need to catch up, so here are the things you’ll want to know ahead of USU’s opening round in the NCAA Tournament.
They play a zone defense (and it’s good)
When the media asked Sam Merrill if he knew anything about Washington, he said, “they play zone” and that was all he really knew.
The man behind that zone scheme is Mike Hopkins, the 2018-19 Pac-12 Coach of the Year. The 49-year old coach, in his second season at Washington, spent 22 years as an assistant at his Alma mater, Syracuse. In all of those seasons, both as a player and assistant, he learned at the knee of current Orange coach Jim Boeheim, a man famous for his stingy 2-3 zone defense.
True to his mentor’s standard, the Huskies rank 30th in points allowed per game at just 64.4. Only 10 teams broke 70 against them and they held 10 teams to under 60 points. Washington also ranked eighth in the country in forced turnovers with opponents averaging 16.2 against them.
Matisse Thybulle is a steals machine
On the subject of defense, something you’ll likely hear in the days leading up to Friday and throughout the TV broadcast is how many steals Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year, Matisse Thybulle, recorded this season. You should know now that the number is 116, or 3.4 per game. And yes, that leads all players in the NCAA. The top two Utah State players in steals, Sam Merrill and Diogo Brito, each had just 37. Combined, that makes just 64 percent of Thybulle’s total.
Their offense is more of a puppy than a full-grown Husky
Though its defense drove fear in the hearts of opposing coaches, the Huskies’ scoring prowess did not. They will enter Friday’s contest as the 253rd-best scoring team in the country based on points per game. Even when you account the slow pace UW plays (they rank 288th in that category) and look at offensive rating, they still come in at an unimpressive 171st.
Jaylen Nowell (pronounced like Noel), led the team in scoring with 16.2 points per game and he’s actually pretty lethal at times. At 6-foot-4, he has the length as a guard to finish among the trees and possesses a soft outside shooting touch (he leads his team in 3-point percentage). Nowell also won Pac-12 Player of the Year.
David Crisp and Noah Dickerson are the other offensive threats, each averaging a little over 12 points per game. Crisp, a 6-foot guard, mans the backcourt with Nowell and leads the team in 3-point attempts with 5.5 per game. Dickerson, a 6-foot-8, 245-pound forward, patrols the paint and is UW’s top rebounder (7.4 per game).
They are bad on the boards
Washington does not lack for size on its roster. The Huskies boast four players at or taller than 6-foot-10, including the 7-foot-4 Riley Sorn. It’s just that none of those guys see the floor. Sam Timmins, a 6-foot-11 junior, is the only player in the rotation north of 6-foot-9; and he plays a mere 10 minutes per game and just 7.9 in his last 10 appearances.
The lack of size hasn’t affected UW’s interior defense, as they rank 30th in 2-point field goal percentage and second in total blocks. Nor has it inordinately hurt their offense. Where the lack of size really hurts them is on the glass. The Huskies rank 293rd in rebounding percentage and are the fifth-worst in the country in allowing offensive rebounds.
Making 3-pointers isn’t the recipe to beating them
If you sat down next a random guy at a sports bar and talked to him about beating a team that employs a zone, the first thing out of his mouth (or perhaps even yours) will be something to the effect of “shoot a bunch of 3-pointers.” That isn’t a bad analysis, as the 2-3 zone often leaves some of the best 3-point shooting spots relatively uncovered compared to most man-to-man schemes.
There’s just one thing: Washington rarely crumbled when its opponents got hot from deep. In the five games they allowed nine or more 3-pointers, the Huskies are 4-1. In games where teams cracked the 40 percent shooting mark from beyond the arc, UW still went 6-3.
Looking at Washington’s losses, there are a couple of common factors in two or three losses, but there aren’t across-the-board similarities. And opponent’s 3-point shooting has certainly not been a common factor in UW losses.
They wet the bed a little to end the season
In their last seven games, UW went a lovely 4-3. One of those losses came against California, a team that went 3-15 in conference play and 8-23 overall. Another came in Washington’s most recent game, a 68-48 pounding at the hands of Oregon. In their last seven games, the Huskies had a negative point differential (-2.4) and were out-rebounded by 9.1 boards per game. Four of their eight worst shooting performances of the season (and two of their worst three) have also come within that seven-game stretch.
The Pac-12 was relatively weak this year
Yes, the Pac-12 is still one of the “Power 5,” but relative to its counterparts, it did very poorly. The conference finished with zero teams in the AP Top 25 and its top team in the NET, Washington, came in at 45th. The Southern Conference had two teams ranked higher in the NET than the Pac-12’s highest. Despite this, there are three Pac-12 schools in the tournament. Washington and Arizona State each got at-large bids with Oregon getting the auto-bid as the conference tournament winner.
It’s still impressive that the Huskies won its conference, that’s never easy to do. Just don’t be intimidated because they’re a Pac-12 school.