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Inside The Huskies

UW's Dzepina Plays More Physical Game in Eurobasket

The Serbian forward took his game inside for two tournament victories.
Dan Raley|
Niko Dzepina lets fly with a shot against Lithuania.
Niko Dzepina lets fly with a shot against Lithuania. | FIB

A half a world away, Nikola Dzepina is making his case for why he and his University of Washington basketball team should be taken more seriously than what first glance might suggest.

After all, the Huskies have gone through yet another roster revamp, with Dzepina just one of five returning scholarship players from a 16-17 team, and he averaged just 2.6 points and 1.3 rebounds per game last winter.

Over the weekend for his Serbian national team in the FIBA U20 Eurobasket, the 6-foot-10 Dzepina provided a 21-point, 13-rebound outing in a 84-67 victory over Poland on Saturday and he came back on Sunday with 12 points and 5 rebounds in a 79-57 win over Lithuania.

So far, so good, for this small forward, whose performances had to be encouraging to Danny Sprinkle's UW coaching staff.

The Huskies are banking on Dzepina making a big jump in his role in Montlake after going through a painstaking freshman initiation.

Joining Sprinkle's team in December, he appeared in 14 of the last 24 games, with his minutes picking up once the UW lost several players to injuries late in the schedule.

While he didn't seem overwhelmed by Big Ten basketball, Dzepina clearly was in need of more muscle to be competitive and better comfort levels.

Nikola Dzepina has scored 21 and 12 points in his first two Eurobasket games.
Nikola Dzepina has scored 21 and 12 points in his first two Eurobasket games. | FIBA

Known as a shooter, Dzepina struggled to find his touch and connected on just 30.2 percent of his attempts from the field (13-43) and 25 percent from 3-point range (9-36).

In Slovenia, he appeared more filled out, especially through the shoulders, and it showed in his tourney debut against Poland.

Dzepina played an inside game almost exclusively, hitting 8 of 14 shots with a dunk, a putback, a couple of reverse lay-ins, a pair of buckets off inside position, a one-hander and a regular lay-in.

Nikola Dzepina shares a moment with his Serbian teammates at Eurobasket.
Nikola Dzepina shares a moment with his Serbian teammates at Eurobasket. | FIBA

In his first two outings, he took just five 3-pointers and made one.

To partially complement Dzepina at the UW, the Huskies went and signed three more international players in Brazil's 6-foot-9 Wini Braga Silva, Croatia's 6-foot-7 Boris Tisma and Australia's 6-foot-4 Tristan Devers.

As Dzepina can tell them, each of the newcomers, no matter how many domestic pro leagues they've played in, will need a period of adjustment in order to cope with a much more physical and athletic college game.

It can be a shock to the system of an overseas player.

Dzepina played in just over half of the games he was in uniform.

The season before, France's 6-foot-7 Dominique Diomande transferred into the UW at midseason and didn't appear in a game before transferring to BYU, where he is now.

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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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