Inside The Huskies

Huskies Needed One More Big Body to Be Able to Beat Anybody

The answer to that situation was another Seattle product who plays for LSU.
Dan Raley|
Huskies Needed One More Big Body to Be Able to Beat Anybody
Huskies Needed One More Big Body to Be Able to Beat Anybody

They were one player short.

The regular season came to a close late Saturday afternoon for the University of Washington basketball team and overall it was considered a success.

The Huskies have a winning record (16-14 overall, 11-9 Pac-12) for the first time in three seasons and finished in the conference upper division.

They coaxed their fans to return to Alaska Airlines Arena after so many pandemic intrusions.

And they likely removed Mike Hopkins from the coaching hot seat.

If there was a program shortfall, the UW probably was one player shy from having a team that could compete with anyone.

A big man who could score on a consistent basis over 30 games.

An overly athletic 6-foot-8 forward as good in the paint as he is in launching 3-pointers.

Tari Eason, for instance.

With their creative rebuild, the Huskies brought in four Seattle-Tacoma players from well established college programs across the country, and each one was a contributor.

They came up with the Pac-12's leading scorer in former Arizona guard Terrell Brown Jr. (21.7 points per game), a fairly productive forward in one-time West Virginia forward Emmitt Matthews Jr. (11.7 scorer and 4.8 rebounder), a hard-nosed playmaker in ex-Stanford guard Daejon Davis (7.3 ppg) and dependable sixth-man and part-time starter in TCU transfer PJ Fuller (7.7 ppg), finishing among the team's top five point-producers.

They needed just one more body to be better than the near break-even team that they were — Eason.

After much deliberation, the Seattle product last spring chose LSU over the Huskies and others, unswayed by the UW bid to have a large-scale homecoming or portal transfer players with roots.

Eason played at Garfield High School for Brandon Roy, same as Brown, Davis and Fuller, and at Federal Way High, alongside Jaden McDaniels, who spent the 2019-20 season at the UW before turning to the NBA.

Yet Eason reportedly wasn't recruited by the Huskies coming out of high school and he went to the SEC after he played a lone college season at Cincinnati.

Now an LSU sophomore, Eason has made himself into a possible NBA lottery pick, leading the Tigers in scoring at 16.9 points per game. He has shown himself capable of playing in the paint as well proficient enough from the 3-point line.

LSU oddly chooses to use Eason coming off the bench, starting him just four times, even though he's turned in a dozen games of 20 points or more. 

On Saturday in Baton Rouge, he blocked a shot with 43 seconds left in overtime and then turned around and scored a clinching basket to wrap up an 80-77 victory over Alabama in overtime.

Eason, similar to Brown and Davis, would have been with the UW for only a season had he joined them. Yet imaginations still run wild over what could have been with one more well-traveled local guy in the rotation.

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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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