Huskies Start Fast, Finish Badly and Get Upset by Cal Baptist

Mike Hopkins' team is soundly beaten by lower-level school.

Weber State, North Florida, Utah Tech and California Baptist weren't exactly the Final Four, but for the University of Washington basketball team, they were meant to serve a necessary purpose.

These non-conference visitors would permit the Huskies to introduce their freshman players to Division I basketball, allow Kentucky transfer Keion Brooks to get injured and recover and enable everyone in a UW jersey to work up a good November sweat.

However on Thursday night, not everything went to plan as the Huskies were upset by soon-to-become Division I member but not there yet California Baptist 73-64 in a fairly empty Alaska Airlines Arena.

Fans just weren't willing to come out and watch a supposed blowout of a team they've never heard of at all. An UW embarrassing face-plant was even less appealing to the masses who watched it on the Pac-12 Network.

It was incredibly disheartening for the Huskies. It was like fingers screeching down a chalkboard times two.

After sitting out a pair of games because of an unspecified injury, Brooks returned to Mike Hopkins' lineup, but he was noticeably rusty and wasn't really a factor at all. The 6-foot-7 SEC import finished with just 11 points on lukewarm 4-for-12 shooting.

"As you could see, you could tell, I had some time off," Brooks said. "I didn't look as sharp as I was before. I've got to do a better job of letting the game come to me. I forced it a couple of times."

The other part of the Keion and Keyon show had an off night, as well. 

True freshman sensation Keyon Menifield, coming off a pair of 20-point games, was given reminder that he's still just four games out of high school. He was limited to 8 points on 4-for-13 shooting.

The Huskies (3-1) started out well enough, hitting their first three shots — 3-pointers by Jamal Bey and PJ Fuller, and a foul-line jumper for Brooks — to grab an 8-0 lead, but they never enjoyed that sort of success the rest of the evening.

They fell down by 33-27 at halftime, then dropped behind by as many as 12 after the break, the last time at 48-36. It was just too much of a hole for the UW to climb out of, and they didn't.

The Lancers (3-1) beat the Huskies both inside and out, with 6-foot-7 swingman Tara Armstrong from Australia driving hard to the basket and leading all scorers with 18 points.

Loyola Marymount transfer Joe Quintana hurt the Huskies from the outside with 17 points on 3-for-8 3-point shooting.

Most disruptive of all was 7-foot Georgetown transfer Tim Ighoefe, who had his way with the Husky bigs by dunking his way to 10 points, snatching 11 rebounds and swatting away 6 shots.

The Huskies, led by 6-foot-11 backup center Franck Kepnang's 14 points and 8 rebounds, made just one real run at Cal Baptist, pulling within four at 50-46 with 9:37 left to play. Yet they never got any closer. 

Seven-foot-one Braxton Meah, the UW's starting center, and Kepnang didn't dominate inside as one would have expected.

"It was one of those games where we needed to stay disciplined and stay solid. ... We have to stay down," Kepnang said of the big men continually leaving their feet and fouling. "Against a smaller college, with me and Braxton being such a big presence down low, we've got to challenge but we have to stay solid."

Yes, it was a smaller college. 

While it's been hard to really tell how good Hopkins' sixth team might be against the early competition, this lower-level club from Riverside, California, fully exposed all of its weaknesses, suggesting another break-even type season might be in order in Montlake. 

The Huskies now take six days off before heading for the Wooden Legacy event, where they'll face Fresno State, Meah's former team, on Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. in game televised by ESPNU. St. Mary's and Vanderbilt meet in the later game and one of them will provide Hopkins' team with a Thanksgiving Day opponent. 

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