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Huskies Land 6-8 African Player, Hoping for Quick Fix

The UW basketball program, most notably with Lorenzo Romar, has gone this route before without minimal success.
Dan Raley|
Huskies Land 6-8 African Player, Hoping for Quick Fix
Huskies Land 6-8 African Player, Hoping for Quick Fix

Mike Hopkins appears to be seeking global assistance for his ongoing domestic crisis.

After losing a pair of guards to the transfer portal over the previous two days, the University of Washington basketball coach reportedly will dip into Africa and add 6-foot-8 Samuel Ariyibi of Nigeria to his major rebuilding effort, according to several news outlets.

The Huskies have turned to the African continent for immediate basketball help before, most notably bringing in 6-foot-9 Malik Dime from Senegal and 6-7 Bitumba Baruti from the Congo when the program started to slide under coach Lorenzo Romar.

It is hoped that Ariyibi, who has a 6-foot-11 wing span, can help shore up a UW front line that was low on scoring and defensive production, and was the crux of the problem in a 5-21 season, the second worst in school history.

Ariyibi was MVP of the 2019 Basketball Without Borders Tournament in Senegal, which is supported by the NBA. He's shown in the accompanying photo with NBA commissioner Adam Silver. 

His commitment comes on the heels of a disruptive last couple of days for the Huskies that saw guards Marcus Tsohonis and Erik Stevenson enter the transfer portal. They were the team's second- and fourth-leading scorers. They could have played two more seasons for the UW, in Tsohonis' case up to three.

Hopkins is under great pressure to find four or five players to right a program in serious trouble following 12th- and 11th-place finishes in the Pac-12.

Previously, Romar brought in Dime for the 2016 and 2017 seasons, which were the coach's final two in Seattle before getting fired. 

Dime started 13 of 20 games as a senior, averaging 5.5 points and 5.5 rebounds per game while  blocking 137 career shots, which was fourth in school history. He now plays professionally in Spain. 

He was notably suspended for two games in his final year for slapping a heckling fan in Colorado.

Baruti played this past season as a senior for East Carolina, starting 5 of 17 games while averaging 6.8 points and 4.2 rebounds, but he has remaining eligibility.

He played sparingly as a freshman at the UW for Romar in 2017, but left the program after Hopkins took over and he didn't play.

On Wednesday, Baruti entered the transfer portal and left East Carolina. 

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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