Washington men’s coach Danny Sprinkle, right, watches the action in the second half of an early season game. (Kevin Clark / The Seattle Times)
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By
Percy Allen
Seattle Times staff reporter
Danny Sprinkle fielded a bunch of questions on Monday before his Washington men’s basketball team boarded a bus that took them to the airport for a flight to Chicago and this week’s Big Ten tournament.
In their past three games, the Huskies have had just as many players sit out (seven) as healthy scholarship players available, and that situation isn’t going to change before No. 12-seed Washington plays No. 13-seed USC in the second round at 11:30 a.m. PT Wednesday at the United Center.
“We’re pretty much the same as we were,” Sprinkle said. “We have a couple guys that are still banged up from the other night … but nothing crazy (and) nothing that’s going to hold anybody out.”
The pertinent concern for the Huskies — and the Trojans for that matter — is do they really want to play more basketball games this season?
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“A lot of these games, it just comes down to what team wants to play and who’s ready to rock ‘n’ roll,” Sprinkle said. “We should be excited. … This is why you play Division I basketball. It’s March, and for the players, this is when you play.
“And this is where stars are born. It could be Courtland (Muldrew)? It could be Nico (Dzepina)? I don’t know. It could be Zoom (Diallo)? Whoever it is, this is the time when you’ve got to play your best.”
The short-handed Huskies (15-16) are low in numbers because of a slew of injuries — Franck Kepnang (knee), JJ Mandaquit (foot), Jacob Ognacevic (foot), Jasir Rencher (heart condition), Mady Traore (foot) — as well as two players (Desmond Claude and Christian Nitu) who left the team and Bryson Tucker who is away for personal reasons.
Sprinkle attributes the lineup disruptions to Washington’s inconsistency — UW has alternated wins and losses in the past seven games — and why the Huskies have fallen short of preseason expectations that tabbed them as an NCAA tournament team.
“We haven’t had the team that we were expecting for one game,” Sprinkle said. “Not one. That’s not an excuse. That’s a fact.”
Similarly, USC (18-13) has dealt with a rash of injuries and was without its top three players (Chad Baker-Mazara, Rodney Rice and Alijah Arenas) for large swaths of the season.
Still, the Trojans started 12-1 while rising to No. 24 in The Associated Press poll. They were 14-3 in January before imploding and finishing the regular season riding a seven-game losing streak that included the dismissal of leading scorer Baker-Mazara.
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“There was progress this year, even with the injuries,” USC coach Eric Musselman told reporters in Los Angeles last week. “What was the goal coming in? It was to make the NCAA tournament, but that was with a healthy group.
“We’re still trying to figure out the landscape of the Big Ten, as are all the West Coast teams. UCLA has had a great year, but the other West Coast teams, we’re still trying to figure out travel, and we’re behind the schools that have been a part of this league for a long time. … We feel this is an NCAA tournament team if we were healthy. We have no doubt that it was — or would be.”
The Huskies feel the same.
To win its first-ever Big Ten tournament game, Washington needs to something that it’s never done — beat USC for the third time in one season.
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In their first meeting on Dec. 6, the Huskies erased an 18-point halftime deficit and staged the second-largest comeback in program history for an 84-76 win at the Galen Center.
Last week, UW thrashed USC 91-72 on Senior Night thanks to dominant performances from star freshman forward Hannes Steinbach (22 points and 24 rebounds) and Diallo (26 points and nine rebounds).
“Our guys have great respect for USC and their players and their talent,” Sprinkle said. “They know what they’re capable of. We just played better in the second half and time ran out. (In) the first half they kicked our butts in both (games). There’s a lot of things that we have to do much better if we want to continue to be successful on Wednesday against them.”
The UW-USC winner faces No. 5-seed Wisconsin in the third round on Thursday.
Percy Allen: pallen@seattletimes.com. Percy Allen is a sports reporter for The Seattle Times, where he writes about the University of Washington Huskies men’s and women’s basketball teams and the Seattle Storm.
