UW Basketball Nosedive Continues as Huskies Get Routed by USC
The University of Washington basketball team threw the ball away on its first two possessions.
That's all it took for this game to get out of reach.
Two trips down the floor, and it was over..
The Huskies, a group with little focus and no discernible organization, fell down 7-0 to USC, played catch-up the rest of the evening and the only mystery was how badly things would end up.
On Thursday night in Los Angeles, the towering and talented Trojans handed out a 95-68 whipping to the Pac-12's last-place team.
"We've got to have a team meeting or something to figure it out," junior guard Jamal Bey said. "Just fix some things and talk and get some stuff out."
Indicative of this mess was coach Mike Hopkins' confusing use of his personnel, a season-long misnomer, in this case Husky guard Erik Stevenson. Coming off a 27-point outing, the Wichita State transfer got yanked just two minutes into the game without taking a shot.
If he was guilty of early defensive shortcomings, he was not the only one.
Stevenson wouldn't put up a field-goal attempt until the eight-minute mark of the half or make one until nine minutes had been played.
"Where he needs to help us is on the defensive end," Hopkins said.
However, the 6-foot-3 junior guard from Lacey, Washington, later got enough touches to lead his team in scoring with 16 points, the bulk of them coming from 4-of-8 shooting beyond the arc.
The Huskies (1-10 overall, 0-6 Pac-12) stumbled to their sixth consecutive defeat — and 23rd in 28 outings over two seasons.
The program hasn't been this woeful at the outset of a season for 67 years, when it began the 1953-54 season 1-10 on its way to a 1-14 opening.
With his team not only losing nonstop but showing no progress, Hopkins has to wonder if his job is now in question.
The Huskies take on first-place UCLA (10-2, 6-0), a 91-61 Thursday winner over Washington State, on Saturday at Pauley Pavilion.
Second-place USC (10-2, 5-1) used the Mobley brothers Evan and Isaiah to do whatever it wanted inside. The siblings fed each other lobs for dunks, making a mockery out of the overmatched Huskies. They exited the game with six minutes remaining.
Evan Mobley, a 7-foot freshman and one of the nation's best big men, will be in the NBA long before the UW ever gets things turned around. He scored 17 points on 6-of-9 shooting and grabbed 6 rebounds
Isaiah Mobley, a 6-10 sophomore, was even better with a career-high 18 points on 6-for-10 shooting and handed out 4 assists.
"We're just getting crushed, interior-wise," Hopkins said of his inside defense. "We have to get better. There's no resistance in there."
Following his early hook, Stevenson eventually heated up and hit three first-half scores, but the Huskies still found themselves down 44-23 at the break.
He was far more fortunate with playing time than teammate and sophomore guard Marcus Tsohonis, who started and scored 24 points against Stanford just two games ago. Against USC, Tsohonis never stirred from the bench.
"I just went with somebody else," Hopkins said.
Junior-college transfer Nate Pryor didn't make the trip to Los Angeles for personal reasons, the coach said.
Husky basketball clearly is in shambles. It's questionable whether this group can win another game.
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